Enemies and Dangers

Introduction

Paranoid character.

"[...] the essential traits of the paranoid character are the following:

- overestimation of oneself;

- distrust;

- falseness of judgment…" (45).

In this chapter, and in the next, we will discuss the second of the three great characteristics of the paranoid character to which the French classicists alluded, although it is preferable to replace the term distrust with the expression hostile behavior. As we shall see, the former is merely one of the ingredients of the latter, for confrontation is not always grounded in distrust. What the paranoid individual truly does is live in a state of permanent struggle, living against the varied enemies that surround him, and for that, distrust is not the only motivation.

Paranoia.

"The patient is dissatisfied with his situation; he feels abandoned, perhaps already believing that he is truly not loved by his parents, brothers and sisters, and that he is not understood; no one understands his individuality. In this way, a growing opposition between him and his surroundings gradually develops" (40).

Paranoid personality.

"He tends to oppose, to argue against, and to be quick to show disagreement" (90).

Factor QIV from the 16PF test.

"[...] likes dispute and is antagonistic…" (37).

One might even say that in confrontation he finds the meaning of his existence.

Delusion of grievance. Clinical case.

"[...] fighting has become for him, not a means, but the sole objective of his life" (81).

The confrontational behavior characteristic of IPs extends to the whole of PCGs, which also tend to oppose, to show themselves antagonistic, and to clash with their surroundings.

Sokagakkai gives us a good example of the importance that enemies hold for the PA. This organization teaches its members a doctrine in which the existence of the organization's enemies is accepted in advance; these enemies are duly classified and described. Members learn that enemies exist, that they are numerous, and that they are active.

Sokagakkai.

"No Bodhisattva of the Earth [no member] can propagate true Buddhism without encountering the three powerful enemies" (38).

Crisis cults typically rebelled against Westerners even in places where their presence had been peaceful, and the relationship between whites and natives had been friendly. But crisis cult leaders often incited uprising, violence and war, against whites or against other indigenous people.

Crisis cults. Hau-hau (19th century).

"Other acts of barbarity occurred. A lone missionary, who had spent most of his life among the Maori and until then had seemed to enjoy their friendship, was crucified…" (10).

All clinicians who have treated members of cult groups and their families agree in highlighting the emergence of an increasingly virulent confrontation between the two. The display of hostile attitudes and the apparent seeking of confrontation constitute one of the central symptoms of cult indoctrination syndrome.

Cult groups in general.

"When one listens to the stories of hundreds of parents, one hears sequences of experiences that seem almost identical and interchangeable among families. A progression of events occurs that leads to a gradual —sometimes rapid— increase in confrontation" (49).

Ungerleider's finding (86) that among active militants in cult groups there is an increase in the "hostility toward family members" scale reflects this last observation.

The insistent preoccupation with the enemy is also a characteristic of SPs. Numerous authors have described the great propensity of nationalism to resort to the image of external enemies.

Nationalism.

"Another characteristic stereotype [of nationalism] is the allusion to the external threat, whether it comes from foreign nations or from the communist Mafia. All of this can be presented convincingly thanks to the overwhelming power of the media" (57).

The greater the paranoidism of a given group, the greater its hostile behavior will be, tending to see more threats and to establish more antagonistic relationships. This is what happened in that particularly exalted form of nationalism that fascisms were.

Fascism.

"[...] the radical nationalist movements of the first European postwar period that we call fascist [...] were exceptional in their hostility to all mainstream currents, of the right, the center, and the left" (67).

Enemies allow the cult follower to feel —when not an innocent victim— a hero, called to the accomplishment of great deeds. In cult rhetoric it is not uncommon for followers to identify themselves with great predators.

Sokagakkai.

"When he took his seat on the platform before the audience, Shin'ichi Yamamoto felt capable of anything. His mind and will were like those of the lion king mentioned in the Gosho. The passage came to his memory naturally: 'When an evil ruler, in conjunction with heretical priests, attempts to destroy True Buddhism and expel the wise man, those who have the heart of the lion will without doubt attain the state of Buddhahood just as Nichiren did'" (34).

Not only must it be taken into account that the paranoid contagion group tends toward a generalized confrontation with everyone, but that it is an especially violent confrontation laden with hatred.

Nazism.

"The Minister emphasizes that the most important task of the coming weeks consists of making the people see, by all means, the necessity of the radical struggle with France. In a popular manner, and by continuously repeating the concepts, it must be explained that the French, in their relations with Germany, have always had one single desire and interest: to divide the country in order to dominate us. By recalling the occupation of the Rhine basin and that of the Ruhr, hatred against France must be inflamed anew; it must be shown how that nation, relatively underpopulated, wants to enslave Germany through the use of overseas peoples, blacks and browns, and the great shame for culture and race that it represents that they have dared to bring blacks to the banks of the Rhine. The French must be called 'blackened sadists', and, in tireless work, it must be achieved that within two weeks, at most, the entire German people is charged with hatred and rage against the corrupt France, poisoned by Freemasonry" (5).

Crisis cults. Hau-hau (19th century).

"[...] his eyes, after being torn out, were eaten as a symbol of the treatment they intended to give to the Queen and Parliament" (10).

The enemy is so absolutely indispensable that, if at any given moment the paranoid contagion group lacks one, it simply invents one.

Nazism.

"The Minister charges Mr. Fritzsche with insistently ensuring that the newspapers conduct the struggle against plutocracy in a more adequate manner. To this end it becomes necessary to clarify the meaning of the word 'plutocracy'. 'Plutocracy' must be the principal concept against which the ideological struggle is directed in the coming times" (5).

This chapter will deal with those threats and enemies that the paranoid individual and group hate and/or fear. They are basically the following:

persons;

human groups;

spirits;

social or natural circumstances and

diseases.

People outside the group

The beings feared/hated by the IGP are, above all, other individuals, of real or imaginary existence, personally known or unknown, individuals whom the IGP identifies as enemies, with or without reason, although in the second case the reaction is always disproportionate. The figure of the enemy appears in the foreground in persecutory delusions, while in other delusional disorders (such as erotomania) it occupies a less prominent place.

Jealous types.

"This other, who can dispossess the owner of the object, and who, in accordance with that concept of ownership, can 'steal' it[...] is therival" (12).

The villain-type

The behavior of enmity causes more and more people from the IP's surroundings to gradually join the ranks of those he considers his enemies. This tendency is facilitated by his propensity to think in terms of frankly negative stereotypes of human nature, which he applies in a rather indiscriminate manner. Once the labels have been applied to a particular individual, no evidence can correct the error. The labels become indelibly attached to their innocent bearer.

Paranoid personality.

"[...] they tend to develop negative stereotypes of others..." (2).

In PAs, these stereotypes are sometimes offered in packaged form, in curious descriptions of thevillain-type, in which a profile is drawn of the perverse, diabolical subject against whom every militant must always be on guard. The characteristics of thevillain-type can easily be applied to anyone who is catalogued as an enemy. Two examples.

Sectarian groups. Hermetic Philosophical Institute.

"The true personal traits of the dishonest are precisely attractive. They tend to be lazy and envious, lacking discipline and willpower, possessed of the internal demand that everything in life should be free, with a deep internal rejection of individual merit and of paying for the good things one desires to have" (4).

Sokagakkai.

"The Three Powerful Enemies are: (1) lay people ignorant of Buddhism who will denounce the devotees of the Lotus Sutra and attack them with swords and sticks; (2) cunning and arrogant monks who, though they still have much to learn about Buddhism, will boast of having attained the highest truth and will slander the devotees of the Lotus Sutra; (3) priests revered as saints and respected by the general public, who out of fear of losing fame or benefits, will incite the secular authorities to persecute the devotees of the Lotus Sutra" (38).

The candidates for enemies

Set on providing ourselves with enemies. From among whom should we choose them preferably?

First of all, anyone who opposes the activities or principles of the group, or dares to criticize the leader or any aspect of its internal functioning, will be ipso facto demonized.

Sokagakkai.

"[...] ignorant and wicked people are troubled by our efforts to eliminate misery and misfortune. Their insults and slanders spring from innate perversity" (34).

Sokagakkai.

"This is the reason why Nichiren Daishonin stated in the Gosho that the offense of slandering true Buddhism and its believers is a thousand times more serious than that of murder" (38).

With these convictions, completely disproportionate reactions against anyone who has the audacity to voice some reproach are justified.

Sectarian groups. Reverend Jones's People's Temple.

"In May 1978, Kathy Hunter, a fifty-eight-year-old writer from Ukiah, went to Guyana to interview Reverend Jim Jones, visit the densely populated agrarian community he had founded, and determine whether the damaging rumors had any basis in fact.

... Mrs. Hunter returned to Ukiah, where her husband, George, was the executive director of the Ukiah Daily Journal. The account of her harrowing experience was published in that newspaper. It did not take long for the 'campaign' to be unleashed. According to the Hunters' account, one Sunday afternoon two men burst into their home, restrained her, and forced her to drink half a bottle of whisky. She had to be hospitalized.

Her brother Michael, who worked in the legal department of an organization called Legal Service Foundation of Ukiah, found this note in his car, written with letters cut out from newspapers. 'Hey, white trash... we know where you live, we are watching you. We know where you work, what your house number is, and what kind of dirty life you lead, filth... You drive your dead mama's car... mind your own business and keep your mouth shut..." (41).

Although, of course, it is more common for reactions to be confined to the verbal level. The following quote shows a typical reaction of a LP toward his detractors.

Sectarian groups. El Patriarca.

"By washing Mary Magdalene's feet, Jesus helped Mankind and Faith much more than with all his miracles.

For miracles are the ordinary act of God, but washing the feet of a prostitute is a wonderful lesson in humanity and humility.

This Christmas, as AIDS ravages and devastates the youth of the world, our young people from ADPPOS, from the Patriarca-Asociación Lucien J. Engelmajer, continue washing the feet and sores of those who suffer and await death with dignity, each and every day.

Unfortunately, I do not see this humanity or this dignity among the prelates who represent Christ.

Is that not so, Bishop of Toulouse?

You who know that in the Engelmajer Foundation Spaces of Care and Health, young people abandoned by all — by you as well — live and die, all except by us!

Oh, yes! I know! This truth will result in a new anathema and rejection by the Church.

But God, Christ, and the Christian will understand and bow their heads before these dead who have remained standing in the face of injuries, insults, and concealment.

Merry Christmas, my friends down here and up there..." (22).

This type of highly personal attack is common in sectarian literature.

A curious phenomenon is that enemies are often chosen from among those who are closest ideologically or those who are supposedly pursuing the same objectives. The first murder committed by the SLA — of Maoist orientation — was precisely against a prominent left-wing leader.

Sectarian-Leninist groupuscule. SLA.

"[...] the SLA despised a long list of people that one would have expected them, as radicals, to have liked; they hated Huey Newton, one of the founders of the Black Panthers. Angela Davis, the avowed Marxist professor who had taught at the University of California, was considered "a pig who had betrayed" her revolutionary comrade George Jackson. Even while a fugitive from the FBI, she was an "outside cop" because she should have been helping George Jackson escape from prison. As for her proclaimed membership in the Communist Party, that did not mean much. The SLA thought that the Communist Party of the United States was "all theory and no action" and consequently "reactionary." Jane Fonda, the outspoken actress, was sentenced as "a fascist of the worst kind" (30).

And it should come as no surprise that an association devoted to helping drug addicts directs its attacks, precisely, against a prestigious professional specializing in the treatment of drug addiction.

Cult groups. El Patriarca.

"Dr. Claude Olivenstein, former collaborator of Engelmajer and, at the time (1985), adviser to the French Government on matters of drug addiction and the bête noire against whom El Patriarca had directed, for years, furious personal attacks..." (74).

Other times, the hated enemy of the IGP is chosen from among the ranks of the most prominent figures in society at a given moment, or they are historical figures.

Nazism.

"... from my earliest childhood I was convinced that... the House of Habsburg was engaged in the task of harming the Germanic lineage" (31).

Cult groups. TFP.

"The name of Henry Kissinger symbolizes in the eyes of universal public opinion all the disasters and disgraces that the Free World suffered in Vietnam. Indeed, the conduct of the former American Secretary of State was characterized by naive optimism, political shortsightedness, weakness, and a defeatist spirit that led to the handing over of a large part of Indochina to communism.

It is natural, then, that the TFPs view with concern and alarm the appointment of Kissinger, in July 1983, as head of a high-level commission charged with advising the American Government on its policy toward Central America" (14).

Cult groups. TFP.

"Voltaire, a despicable man, a contemptible atheist, a fierce propagator of the principles of the Revolution, but admittedly witty…" (18).

A frequent target of the anger of cult groups are former members, who deserve — almost without exception — the greatest contempt.

Cult groups. Moonies.

"The Moonies are very effective at convincing people that former members of the cult are satanic and that even the mere fact of being in their presence can prove dangerous" (29).

Hostility toward former members can go as far as manifesting itself in their murder.

Cult groups. Islam Nation.

"The one who thus held forth had been a common criminal and had gone through the hell of prison, where he was catechized by fellow inmates who belonged to a tiny organization, half religious, half political, called The Nation of Islam. In the thirteen years he lived, from his release from prison in 1952, until 1965, when he was assassinated in a New York auditorium (by his own cult brothers, from which he had separated himself) Malcolm X carried out a feverish activity" (88).

Sectarian-Leninist splinter group. SLA.

"I heard, frightened, how one or two in the room objected to the promulgation of death sentences as a political matter, and the majority, I believe, tried specifically to get Cin to rescind the death sentence on Robyn Steiner. They did not believe she was informing on the group to the police. But Cin said that he had already warned her of her death sentence if she did not return to the SLA and she had refused. 'She knows the Codes of War,' he shouted. 'If she is not with us, she is against us. She had her chance!" (30).

In summary. The people outside the paranoid contagion group who are most easily categorized as enemies are found among:

critics,

competitors,

popular figures and historical figures and

former members of the group.

Outer group

The being feared, threatening, and hated by the IGP may be, not an individual (or several unrelated individuals), but a human group as a whole. Often, the enemy group is chosen from those closest to the GCP, from a territorial or ideological point of view. Thus, the declared enemy of the German nation had to be… the French nation.

German nationalism.

"Arndt, Goerres (for whom the French are the hereditary enemy) defend the same ideas. Arndt does so with a popular sullenness, preaching at the same time the wars of liberation of 1813, the hatred of the French, 'who tear apart our energy and weaken our virtues and our power'. One of his pamphlets bears the title, 'The Rhine, German River and Not Germany's Border'" (19).

And the declared enemy of a Buddhist church is the other Buddhist schools.

Sokagakkai.

"The other cults are attacked indiscriminately; all are in league with corrupt politicians, all are greedy, opportunistic, and mercenary, and all (apart from their general malign influence) harbor evil designs with respect to the Gakkai's embodiment of the true religion" (91).

There exists the possibility that, even with an enemy group present, a particular individual within said group may be singled out.

Folie à deux. Clinical case.

"The mother is being persecuted, but her delusion, without complications of senility (she is 40 years old), points to definite objects. It is the priests, one above all, who are relentless against her and prevent her from finding work" (47).

With a certain regularity, the enemy that the paranoid contagion group believes it is confronting is a coalition of the powerful, among whom a secret alliance would exist.

Sectarian-Leninist groupuscule. SLA.

"Cin also informed me that the newspapers had estimated that the food program requested by the SLA would cost around four hundred million dollars and that my father had announced on television that he had no way of being able to pay four hundred million dollars for my release.

[...] The truth, according to Cin's assessment, was that my father was a member of the ruling class and the ruling class did not want to set a precedent by paying a ransom because then other children of the ruling class would be kidnapped and held for ransom. No, my father would sooner sacrifice me than abandon his rich friends and the power structure that governs Amerikkka" (30).

The conspiracy of the big fish exerts its influence in their own country or… in the entire world.

Sectarian groups. Hermetic Philosophical Institute.

"Millions of sleepwalkers march obediently through the world, driven by the subliminal messages that nest in their brains, which mobilize them toward ends they are unaware of, making them advance toward a chimerical goal that exists only in their fantasies and which they will never reach, since it constitutes merely a subterfuge to use them in the service of dark and covert purposes.

I have no doubt that there exists a worldwide conspiracy with the purpose of reviving the dark era of slavery, only now in a more sophisticated form, without discrimination based on color or race and without chains or irons that imprison people's limbs. Much simpler, and absolutely legal, is to enslave people's minds through audiovisual technology and subliminal messages, with the purpose of directing behavior and thus creating the perfect slave: an obedient consumer, a submissive voter, and a compelled worker"(4).

The TFP sets a good elite against a bad one. The first is headed by the nobles (sic) and other estates that, under feudalism, were situated above the common people, and who must once again occupy the place that rightfully belongs to them. The second elite is that of the toads, made up of ambitious upstarts.

Sectarian groups. TFP.

"The toads are like a cancer of the social body. Instead of crowning a harmonious hierarchy of elites, they build their own structure of power, influence, and prestige, with no connection to the best of the country. The dynamism of this unnatural structure gravely harms the health and balance of the political, economic, social, and cultural life of the nation" (17).

Sectarian groups. TFP.

"It goes beyond the objectives of this study to attempt a broad explanation of this phenomenon. Revealing, however, is the similarity between the role of the toads in capitalist countries and that of the nomenklatura in communist regimes. Indeed, the overwhelming power of the privileged caste of the communist state, which meddles in all fields of human life, has much in common with the overpowering economic power of the capitalist counter-elites. In short, the nomenklatura and the toads are two sides of the same coin. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that these counter-elites, so similar yet apparently opposed, easily cross ideological barriers" (17).

So much for the human enemies. Are there, in the paranoid universe, other enemies… inhumanones?

Demons and Witches

Sokagakkai.

"I think that the essence of good is the aspiration to unity, while the demon is oriented toward division or separation. The function of the demon is always to create divisions; to cause fissures in the human heart; to sever the bonds between family members, colleagues, friends or acquaintances; to engender enmity between countries and ethnic groups; and to destroy the human sense of unity with nature and the universe. Where division reigns, human beings become isolated and fall victim to unhappiness and misery" (33).

Sokagakkai.

"Since ours is a battle between the Buddha and the demon, we must triumph" (34).

Until relatively recent times, belief in the existence of living beings that are simultaneously incorporeal and near, capable of influencing, for good or for ill, the events, lives and decisions of people, has been nearly universal.

"This temptation is so ancient that Zeus himself alludes to it in the opening lines of the Odyssey. 'How readily mortals blame the gods! They say that evil things come to them from us, yet it is they who, through their own recklessness, bring upon themselves sorrows not decreed by fate'" (63).

Paranoid contagion groups tend to polarize these spiritual beings into two opposing groups: the good and the bad. At this moment we are concerned with the latter (demons, in our culture), given that in the paranoid universe they can play the role of declared enemies and produce the same perception of omnipresent threat as that provoked by mortal enemies.

Cult groups. Moonies.

"It did not occur to me, in my state of confusion, that I had been subjected to mind control, that just one week before I had not believed in the existence of Satan, and that now I was afraid he might be influencing my thoughts" (29).

Witches and demons do not ordinarily appear in the contents of the delusions of current paranoid patients, although there are exceptions.

Acute psychoses. Clinical case.

- I went to A. for two weeks and my mother fell ill and I took her to the hospital and I started acting very strangely, the name of the evil one kept coming to my lips...

However, PI occasionally still see dangerous fantastical beings in the plates of the Rorschach test.

Paranoidism in general. Rorschach test.

"Contents such as 'ghosts'..." (68).

Paranoidism in general. Rorschach test.

"Contents such as [...] 'goblin', 'witch'..." (68).

This type of response is obtained in patients who have never expressed any fear or concern regarding malevolent spiritual beings and who do not even believe in their existence. But there are AP in which demons do constitute one of their central beliefs.

Sectarian groups. Moonies.

"Each missionary commits to delivering at least five hundred francs daily to the head of the center [...] Gérard is convinced that, if he does not reach this objective, he will fall under the influence of Satan" (9).

Cult groups. Hare Krishna.

"The Krishnas consider themselves the last and best line of defense against the sudras, the inferior forces that were subverting the world" (27).

A particular feature of demons, in relation to other enemies, is their capacity to influence the health and the thoughts and desires of people, as well as their power to "enter" the body or mind of the victim.

Cult groups. Maranatha Christian Ministries.

"Normally the supervisor would 'discern' a demon or receive a revelation about the disciple while he was withdrawn in prayer. What was expected of the possessed person (the one who had the demons) was that he pray and think about when that particular demon might have gained access. Some of these memories were from the womb when, perhaps, the mother might have thought something sinful and the demon could have entered the unborn child. Ironically, it was normally the supervisor who would 'remember' the incident for the disciple" (24).

Although their primary nature is incorporeal, demons can become incarnate and present themselves with a human appearance.

Cult groups. TFP.

"The Founder would examine photographs in which a number of politicians appeared together and would point out which of the figures were in reality demons who had insinuated themselves" (72).

Cult groups. TFP.

"The group believes that UFOs are nothing more than demons. The proliferation of news about them is yet another sign confirming the proximity of the Bagarre" (72).

The paranoid contagion group not only fears the devil for the harm he can directly inflict, but also fears and struggles against his earthly agents or representatives, whether these be ideologies (such as communism) or human groups (the JW identify "the clergy of Christendom" as the "offspring of Satan").

Cults. Moonies.

"This time, Miller gave a lecture on communism. He explained that communism was the satanic version of God's ideal plan, although it denied the existence of God. It was, therefore, the religion of Satan on earth and had to be opposed with all vehemence" (29).

Cults. TFP.

"The bulletin 'TFP Lusa Informa' publishes a brief study demonstrating the esoteric and satanist nature of rock. To this end, it draws on the analysis of some lyrics by well-known bands such as the Rolling Stones and Kiss, among others" (14).

In the end, everything foreign to the group itself tends to fall increasingly on the side of Satan.

Cults. Children of God.

"THERE ARE SO MANY BIBLE STORIES AND SO MUCH TO TEACH FROM MO'S LETTERS, WHY WOULD WE TEACH THEM ANYTHING MORE? I can't understand why we can't teach our kids only Bible stories, true stories and the things the Lord gives, like the Mo letters that the Lord has given. Why do you have to teach Hans Christian Andersen, the Grimm fairy tales, Mother Goose rhymes or things like that? I think much of that is of the Devil" (59).

The rage of paranoid contagion groups can be directed toward real, flesh-and-blood people branded as witches. This accusation implies the possession of superhuman powers or qualities, or the existence of an alliance or some kind of connection with the spiritual forces of evil.

Crisis cults. Handsome Lake (18th century).

"Several women were cruelly executed as suspected witches" (42).

Crisis cults. Lauliwasikaw (19th century).

"Lauliwasikaw's words provoked a keen excitement, whose most immediate effect was to send to the stake the 'medicine men' and the women accused of witchcraft. The first victims designated by the Shawnee prophet were Delaware Indians, among them an old woman who was roasted over a slow fire for four days until, at the moment of her death, she recalled that her grandson, upon going out to hunt, had taken his grandmother's 'medicine bag' with him. Once captured, he admitted without any coercion that the medicine had helped him fly through Kentucky to the Mississippi and back in a single day. But he insisted that he had returned the 'medicine bag,' and was released. Soon it was the turn of a respectable chief, Tatepocosche, whose death was decided during a council. Dressed in his finest attire, awaiting his death, the old man was struck down, out of respect, with a blow of a tomahawk before being burned. The following day, an old Indian preacher named Joshua was likewise delivered to the flames, as was the chief's nephew, a blameless young man who died singing and praying" (42).

And in a world that is more materialistic and less inclined to see the influence of spirits behind every event, demons and witches are transformed into simple metaphors or into a mere verbal device with which to allude to one's enemies.

Maoist Leninism.

"All erroneous ideas, all poisonous weeds and all monsters and demons must be subjected to criticism; under no circumstances can we allow them to spread freely" (52).

Illnesses

The paranoid relationship. Tizón.

"In that sense, hypochondria and hypochondriac states can be understood as paranoid organizations of the relationship in which the persecutor is not entirely projected, but rather resides in that transitional space between oneself and others that is the body" (83).

The protagonists of persecution and harm delusions are not always human beings or anthropomorphic spirits. In some paranoid patients the threat comes from the body itself. Viruses, bacteria, parasites, or groups of cells that turn malignant are the source of patients' fears. Closely related to this type of threat are those posed by the multiple environmental toxic agents.

Delusion of dermatozoic infestation. Clinical case.

"For several years she had suffered from delusions of infestation; small animals crawled under her hair and crept beneath her skin. She could also hear the insects and see them when combing her hair" (7).

Delusion of dermatozoic infestation. Clinical case.

"She would present to her doctor with 'specimens' in a matchbox" (7).

Hypochondriac delusional disorder. Clinical case.

"He believed that bacteria in the oral cavity were damaging his brain" (39).

There also exists an "epidemio-hypochondriasis", in which the PI fears for the health of his community more than for his own.

Delusion of dermatozoic infestation.

"There was a grandiose quality to the complaint of another patient who shut herself in her house, gave up her home help, and believed that she would otherwise completely contaminate the city of Manchester" (61).

The paranoid fear of illness does not manifest itself solely in hypochondriacal delusions. Kraepelin reminded us that diffuse hypochondriacal apprehensions are among the symptoms that, in paranoia, tend to precede the emergence of delusional ideas, whatever their content may be.

Curiously, a review of the literature on paranoid contagion groups reveals that same propensity toward hypochondriasis, although, of course, with varying degrees of emphasis or of distortion of reality.

In general, paranoid contagion groups tend to foster a fearful and hypervigilant attitude toward physical symptoms. For example, in the magazines of Jehovah's Witnesses, which combine theological articles with others of general interest, it is striking that among the latter, those devoted to illness and to the suffering and limitations it entails are so frequent. Yet the treatment given to these health-related matters is fairly neutral. On the other hand, there exist paranoid cults in which, among the attributes of the new man that their followers are transformed into, immunity against various ailments and external aggressions is included.

A particular type of paranoid cult, oriented toward the fight against a disease, is that formed by patients who share a common pathology.

Cult groups. El Patriarca.

"Le Patriarche is engaged in the fight against drug addiction; it is a global dynamic of struggle against drug addiction" (23).

Therapeutic APs are oriented, in this case, against a real enemy, a genuine illness, and not so much against invented enemies. These are exclusivist groups that are convinced they are the only ones truly effective in treating the illness in question, and that place little trust in any other type of intervention.

Sectarian groups. El Patriarca.

"... It is difficult for doctors to decide on hospitalization since the Association interprets it as a pretext to change interlocutors or to obtain some benefit...

... The lack of medical follow-up is evident throughout the entire stay in the Association's various centers" (From the report of the French Interministerial Commission that investigated El Patriarca, cited in 74).

The best-known therapeutic groups are those aimed at treating drug dependencies, but more attenuated paranoid dynamics can also be observed in associations of other types of patients.

A hostile attitude toward the medical profession is often associated with hypochondria, with doctors being criticized for their incompetence, their ignorance, their involvement in shady dealings, or their bad faith.

Delusion of dermatozoic infestation. Clinical case.

"A 58-year-old woman was forcibly admitted to hospital in 1967 after firing twice (and missing) at her family doctor with a hunting shotgun [...] she developed delusions that he had organized a plot against her, and that he was responsible for her symptoms [...] Before attacking him she had not slept for a week. She told her doctor, who had apparently refused to treat her" (7).

A variant of hypochondriasis is what are mistakenly called "environmental phobias," where the enemy of health is found not inside the organism itself but outside, in the surrounding environment. Apprehensive attitudes toward this type of danger lead in most cases to three types of reactions: dietary restrictions, cleaning/purification practices, and flight to rural environments. In a fairly similar way, paranoid distrust can attribute devastating addictive properties to relatively innocuous foods or drinks.

Albanian Leninism.

"This is not only the most important investment made by a foreign company in post-communist Albania, but also the collapse of one of the great myths of the past. Five or six years ago, an article published in the newspaper Zeri i Rinise (The Voice of Youth) of the Albanian communist youth, explained in the following terms the malevolent effects of the American drink: 'Thousands and thousands of dying young North Americans are found at the foot of the Statue of Liberty. They are confused and nearly finished. Much the same is happening in other major cities of Western Europe... It is the tremendous effect of hard drugs, among which the ill-famed Coca-Cola occupies a paramount place" (28).

Toxic substances can play the role of great threat not so much for their capacity to produce dependency and damage the organism as for their impure, immoral, and even demonic character. This is the case in numerous orientalist groups. As for crisis cults, it is very understandable that they rise up so frequently against alcohol as the great enemy that must be defeated and eradicated, given the havoc that its consumption produces in tribal societies immersed in processes of acculturation.

Crisis cults. Handsome Lake (18th century).

"In June 1799, Handsome Lake had a vision or a dream. Three angels descended from heaven to explain to him that his illness was due to his excessive drinking" (43).

Catastrophes

Among the dangerous threats that lurk over the unfortunate PPI, mention must also be made of those that stem from a negative evolution of natural and/or social circumstances.

Paranoid personality.

"Tends to 'catastrophize'; predisposition to seeing problems as disastrous, unsolvable, etc." (90).

Paranoid personality. Clinical case.

- I already know things are going to go badly.

Paranoiac character. Clinical case.

"I have suffered so many misfortunes that I am always on alert, ready to spring, I always expect misfortune, I can see it coming; at times I could thrash about like a tiger" (25).

Consistent with this tendency, patients recount occurrences of the following nature:

Jealous-type patient. Clinical case.

- I wake up obsessed with the idea that my brother is going to have a car accident.

Catastrophism, duly noted by Westen (90) as one of the characteristics that identify the paranoid personality, has gone much more unnoticed in the eyes of clinical observation than interpersonal distrust, persecution, and harm. This is so because catastrophic themes are indeed relatively less frequent among paranoid individuals who can be treated in psychiatric hospitals and outpatient clinics. Furthermore, the catastrophist bias in assessing the development of circumstances produces fewer conflicts with those around them, and is therefore more likely to be omitted by patients and their families during interviews, or to fail to arouse the physician's interest. Perhaps the catastrophism of a large portion of paranoid contagion groups may prove more striking.

Cult groups. El Patriarca.

"... Lucien is the leader of our army, the only one who denounces the catastrophic situation, a catastrophe that will be even worse if all of humanity does not commit to this battle…" (11).

Sokagakkai.

"As a Buddhist I cannot but be deeply concerned about the general calamities that await us. I suspect that in Japan too we will face hard times for several years and that little by little we will be forced to give up much of what we have accumulated" (35).

In some paranoid associations, catastrophic visions occupy a central place among their tribulations, and the followers dwell on them obsessively.

Cult groups. TFP.

"During the group's meals, news clippings are read aloud, duly underlined, highlighting major catastrophes: epidemics, earthquakes, wars, power outages, bacteriological attacks, etc. — unmistakable signs of the imminence of the Bagarre" (72).

The belief in catastrophic endings is not exclusive to religious groups. Hitler was convinced that the growth of the German population would make it impossible to feed them, which would ultimately produce a great famine. That was precisely one of the main justifications for his project of territorial expansion. He was incapable of trusting in technological progress or in trade. Leninism was born with the absolute conviction that the end of capitalism was imminent, an end marked by a violent confrontation between social classes. The progressive impoverishment and extreme misery of the working class would inexorably lead to an uprising against the exploiters. The mission of the militants was none other than to catalyze and direct the revolutionary process, which was moreover considered inexorable. The same incapacity to admit the possibility, the mere possibility, of a more favorable evolution of events.

Catastrophist themes

For the IGP, the majority of catastrophes stem from the incapacity of men to organize themselves collectively and respond in a sensible and adequate manner to the challenges they encounter, all of this as a consequence of a state of moral degeneration of society, a recurring theme in the IGP's discourse.

Italian Fascism.

"The fascists powerfully reflected the concern over the decline of society and culture that had been growing since the mid-eighteenth century. They believed that decadence could only be overcome by means of a new revolutionary culture led by new elites, which would replace the old elites of liberalism, conservatism, and the left" (67).

As for natural catastrophes (earthquakes, tidal waves, floods, meteorites...), they occur equally in a natural way (redundancy notwithstanding), as a consequence of human activity or divine decisions.

In general, the literature of the paranoid contagion groups identifies and describes with some specificity the catastrophes looming over us. But, on other occasions, that same literature employs exaggerations that are clearly at odds with reality and that, despite being literary licenses, contribute to creating among followers an atmosphere of cataclysm.

Cult groups. El Patriarca.

"Where are the enlightened warnings

from the 'media', from the Chinese, from Buddha.

We shall see after Europe

after the death of the majority

of our children.

If not, be careful

do something..." (22).

The fascination that paranoid contagion groups feel for fire —which destroys everything— and for igneous imagery bears a close, though not exclusive, relationship to catastrophist tendencies.

Cult groups. TFP.

"With the expressive title Brazil in Flames, a special edition of 'Catholicism' analyzes the true erysipelas of rural and urban agitations that, with the declared support of clergy and organizations linked to the Catholic left, convulse the country" (14).

Sectarian groups. The Davidians.

"David Koresh was obsessed with fire, especially with the biblical fire of the Apocalypse, report Michael Kennedy and Louis Sahagun of the Los Angeles Times. Also known as the Book of Revelations, the Apocalypse recounts a story of the end of the world in which a series of cataclysms, in which 'cries and fire were mixed with blood', precede the end of the world.

According to the text that fascinated the leader of the Davidians, men are tormented 'with fire and brimstone before the presence of the holy angels and in the presence of the Lamb'. Koresh was convinced that he was the Lamb, the Messiah who was going to unleash the final judgment, and in his prophecies he would often allude to the martyrdom of the Davidians and his own murder in a siege in which 'the fire of their torment', as the Apocalypse says, 'shall ascend them forever' to paradise" (19).

Crisis cults. Handsome Lake (18th c.).

"The world would be destroyed by flames and the wicked would go to hell, where they would suffer torments similar to the tortures that the Iroquois formerly inflicted on prisoners of war. No white man would go to heaven with the good Seneca. Even George Washington, the best of them, would remain suspended on the boundary between heaven and hell" (42).

In the most drastic expression of catastrophism, the final cataclysm entails the physical disappearance of a people, a nation, or even the entire planet.

Cult groups. A Pentecostalist indigenous community in Yucatán.

"[...] the group believed that the end of the world was imminent" (26).

Cult groups. Jehovah's Witnesses.

"Soon the turbulent history of humanity will reach a catastrophic culmination, when God and Jesus Christ pass judgment on today's wicked system..." (3).

Cult groups. The Davidians.

"The Davidian branch has lived obsessed, since its origins, with the imminent coming of the end of the world" (75).

Cult groups. Great White Brotherhood.

"She calls herself María Devi Christos or Seventh Messiah, and the cult of the White Brotherhood she leads has asked its roughly 150,000 followers to gather in Kyiv on the coming 24th of November, the day which, according to them, marks the end of the world, and to immolate themselves en masse in order to accompany her in her ascent to heaven. The matter has caused great concern among the Ukrainian authorities, who have already banned the cult and issued an arrest warrant against guru Yuri Krivonogov, an elderly professor from the mining region of Donetsk who is reportedly in hiding in Poland, according to police" (62).

Cult groups. The Reverend Jones's People's Temple.

"1965. Jones claims to have had a vision of the nuclear holocaust that was to occur on July 15, 1967" (41).

Present and future catastrophe

Although the dynamics of catastrophism refer, above all, to something that is going to happen in the future, there is equally a catastrophism that revolves around the current situation, in whose evaluation a filter is introduced that only allows the negative aspects to be seen. In addition to the great catastrophe that is yet to come, it turns out that everything or almost everything is already —now— quite catastrophic.

Cult groups. TFP.

"There is something liberal or Lutheran in imagining that so many crimes deserve no punishment, and that such an apostasy of the masses was brought about by a mere intellectual error, without grave sin for humanity. The contemporary picture is none other than this: on one side an iniquitous and sinful civilization, and on the other the Creator, wielding the whip of divine punishments" (18).

Cult groups. TFP.

"When Brazil reaches 150 years of independent life, 'Catolicismo' publishes a prayer to Our Lady Aparecida composed by Professor Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira, from which we highlight some fragments: 'In public life, as in that of individuals, terrible germs of deterioration are noted that keep all lucid and vigilant minds on edge" (14).

Sokagakkai.

"The world in 1974

[An analysis is carried out on the political-economic situation of the world at that time…]

The cruel and violent atmosphere that surrounds the Japanese islands brings to mind that dark period of the Second World War and the immediate postwar years"(35).

Cult groups. Children of God.

"The Church has failed, families have failed, education has failed, governments have failed, the entire world has failed..." (54).

Cult groups. Hermetic Philosophical Institute.

"Man has lost his evolutionary path, and it is of pressing necessity to recover his course, since until he manages to do so, he will lie in moral, emotional and cognitive desolation

[...] It is a buffoonery to speak of 'individual freedom' in a world in which children are hypnotized from infancy by television, with the purpose of turning them into obedient consumers and docile members of the flock, reaching adulthood absolutely and entirely programmed.

Life in large cities is a continuous succession of hypnotizing stimuli, as if everything had been organized with this purpose in mind

[...] The cult of money, social climbing, petty politics, the fondness for luxury, gambling, drug consumption, aggressiveness and violence, terrorism, the pursuit of power, envy, resentment, narcissism, sex as a consumer commodity, pornography, and perversions of all kinds constitute diverse forms of alienation, where we invariably find human masses possessed and driven by forces alien and superior to their will and rationality.

[...] Current education does not form better human beings, but fictional characters with scarce human content, 'electronic men', whose memory chips direct their behavior" (4).

With this conviction that everything is very wrong, the IGP easily extrapolates its pessimism regarding the present into the future.

Sokagakkai.

"In a series of five national surveys conducted in 1965 and 1966, Komeito sympathizers [political arm of the Sokagakkai] expressed strong disapproval of the Sato cabinet; they were more negative than those of any political group except the Communist Party. Furthermore, according to three of these five studies carried out by the Mainichi Shimbun, they were relatively pessimistic regarding the future performance of the political system -again, only less pessimistic than the communists" (91).

Sectarian groups. TFP.

"In other words, if we analyze the internal life of each nation, we notice in it a state of agitation, of disorder, of unbridled appetites and ambitions, of subversion of values, which if it is not already open anarchy, is in any case moving toward it. No statesman of our time has managed to present a remedy that cuts off this morbid process of universal scope" (6).

The fact that everything is going wrong and getting worse leads inexorably to great catastrophes, to the final cataclysm.

Sectarian groups. Children of God.

"This reveals that the day will come when the dollar will be worth nothing, and not only among Americans themselves, but even the government itself will not accept its own money, conscious that it is worth nothing!

[...] But as one can see the roller coaster sled is picking up speed as it goes down, and when it hits the ground it will not go back up, it will crash!" (58).

Sectarian groups. TFP.

"It is increasingly evident that the Hollywood capitalist myth upon which the world organized itself since the end of World War I has exhausted its possibilities and entered into an inexorable decline. The optimists still claim that it is an eclipse; the perspicacious know that it is a sunset" (15).

The paranoid bias leads one to think that, in addition to being inexorable, the end is near. The imminence of the final cataclysm always exerts a stimulating effect on the PA, whose adepts redouble their proselytizing efforts and their efforts to strengthen the group. For Jehovah's Witnesses, Jesus's phrase 'This generation will by no means pass away until all these things happen' (Mark 13:30) means that his descent to Earth will occur before the last survivor among those of his Witnesses who were alive when he was crowned King in October 1914 passes away. The few who still remain are of very advanced age…

Sokagakkai.

"On another occasion, a debate about kosen-rufu in Asia drifted into broader topics. Toda said that the Gohonzon is the only object of veneration for all of humanity, and that once it and the Supreme Law had been propagated to all the people of Japan, it would inevitably reach every corner of the planet. -Men, everywhere, even though they do not yet know of the existence of the Gohonzon, already feel that the end of this materialist civilization is approaching. Sooner or later, they will come to feel the need for the Gohonzon. And then, making it known to them will be the mission of people like yourselves, members of the Suiko-kai, and of those who will be your successors.

'Perhaps the materialist civilization of today will not collapse in one or two decades. But I am certain that it will not reach the twenty-first century. Its collapse is imminent, and it is you who will have to witness it" (34).

Sectarian groups. TFP.

"What came of the spread of that myth? In the socio-cultural realm, spontaneity gave way to extravagance, from extravagance to licentiousness, and finally to monstrousness. The Californian mansions — where sumptuousness competed with bad taste — were the setting for an enormous sociological mutation: the athletic leading men and dazzling femmes fatales who inhabited them were transformed first into playboys of extravagance, into glamour girls who accumulated records of divorces and new 'marriages', and finally into disheveled hippies, into drug addicts, into homosexuals, into mystics devoted to pagan religions, into rock musicians, whose hideous cacophony is pierced by roars of blasphemies against God and invocations to Satan... And in the economic realm, the oracles of the financial world are already predicting the monetary collapse of the United States, based on a basic piece of evidence: the growing and gigantic domestic North American deficit will not allow the value of its currency to be sustained for much longer. The American illusion is drawing to a close. Blind optimism is gradually giving way, throughout the Americanized world, to an apprehensive uncertainty" (15).

Thematic variants

There are some variants, which change from one group to another, that introduce nuances into the theme of the great catastrophe. Let us look at three of them:

1) It is within the power of the paranoid contagion group to prevent the final evolution toward cataclysm. The avoidance of such is often made dependent on its successes in proselytizing activity.

Sokagakkai.

"Japan suffered the hell of World War II for not following the teachings of Nichiren Daishonin. Today the world may experience the total eclipse of nuclear war if we do not follow Ikeda's teachings on peace and religion" (55).

French imperialism.

"In May 1799, when the Austro-Hungarian armies seemed on the verge of victory, General Masséna publicly announced that: 'Only the efforts of France prevent Europe from falling back into the barbarism into which its enemies are plunging it'" (92).

2) A much more anecdotal variant goes as follows: catastrophes occur because the world is hostile toward the PGC and will cease to occur if the world changes its attitude.

Sokagakkai.

"Ikeda has gone so far as to claim that Japan's defeat in the Pacific War was punishment for the governmental suppression of Nichiren Shoshu and the support of false religions during the war:

When the nation is disturbed, it will be attacked by the enemy and the people will suffer extreme hardship. In the Pacific War, the Japanese were greatly distressed, as they were in the Kamakura era when the Mongol invaders plundered the two islands, Iki and Tsushima, and also the coast of Kyushu... At that time Nichiren Daishonin was alive and defending his country, but during the Pacific War, it came to shipwreck and ruin because the government oppressed Nichiren Shoshu and Soka Gakkai" (55).

3) The cataclysm will not reach everyone; members of the AP will be saved.

Crisis cults. The Ghost Dance (19th century).

"As a consequence of the settlement of the semi-desert Great Basin by the Mormons, a Paviotso Indian named Tavibo had visions of the Great Spirit, who revealed to him that a great earthquake would bury all the white people, but without damaging their houses, their belongings, or their provisions. The unbelievers laughed at an earthquake capable of making such a distinction, so Tavibo returned to the mountain, where he had another vision. This time the Indians and the white people would be buried, but, after three days, all the ghosts of the dead Indians, as well as the game animals and the fish, would return, but the white people would have disappeared forever. There were still skeptics, and Tavibo set out for the mountains a third time; only those who had faith and danced his new Ghost Dance around a central fire would be saved together with the spirits of their dead" (43).

Thanks to the messages they receive from extraterrestrials via ouija board, the followers of a Spanish ufological group are convinced that a rain of stones will put an end to the planet in the coming years. However, the aliens are transporting a few specimens of every animal and plant species to another planet, where life will continue. Only the most spiritually advanced will be among the specimens of homo sapiens who will be able to board this sort of sidereal Noah's Ark; the reader can imagine who they are.

The prophesied catastrophe

Let us highlight a curious though well-known fact. Catastrophic convictions are often grounded in ancient prophecies, the hour of whose fulfillment would have already arrived.

Sectarian groups. TFP.

"But all these dreams, all these prefigurations are little or nothing in comparison with the Revolution in whose process we live. This, by its radicality, by its universality, by its vigor, was so deep and is reaching so far that it constitutes something without equal in History, and causes many measured spirits to wonder whether we are not truly arriving at the times [prophesied in the New Testament] of the Antichrist"(18).

Sectarian groups. TFP.

"For all this, it seems to us that the terrible sufferings of the Second World War must be considered as nothing other than the prolegomena of the chastisements announced by Our Lady and which are yet to be completed"(6).

Sokagakkai.

"After the paragraph from Zuiso-gosho (On good omens) previously cited, the following commentary is found: 'consequently, if the five sensory organs of sentient beings are on the verge of being destroyed, their entire environment expresses the same anguish. If the country is on the brink of ruin, threatening signs appear: the mountains crumble, the trees and plants wither, the rivers dry up. Natural disasters occur when sight, hearing and other sensory organs find themselves stunned, and the Earth trembles when the spirits of men are not steadfast.'

[...] Such is my interpretation of this text and I consider it to be perfectly applicable to the world in which we live: a world where the ills of society and civilization threaten to destroy humanity. There is no longer any need to look very far to find tottering mountains, anaemic plants and dry rivers" (32).

The catastrophism of the PI

As for the PI, it is often more concerned with its own end than with the end of the world. Of course, in thinking about its own death the PI is not displaying a fanciful invention, for it will indeed die sooner or later. However, it gives itself away by the obsessive nature of its preoccupation with the inevitable and by its tendency to think that death is imminent — when in reality there is no reason for it to be so.

Folie à deux. Clinical case.

- [...] that these silly thoughts won't leave your head [...] that you have to die, that the bugs will eat you...

Folie à deux. Clinical case.

"She spends her nights wide awake; she gets up terrified, lights candles on a table she has first covered with a tablecloth, declaring that the priest is ready to come and administer the sacraments because death is near" (46).

The obsession with death can equally refer to people in one's immediate surroundings.

Paranoid personality. Clinical case.

A paranoid patient, a university graduate, explaining his refusal to work and his exclusive dedication to raising and educating his children, remarked:

- In daycare centers, children die just like that (gesture with the hand, bringing the fingertips together, indicating a superlative degree).

Another patient with elaborate delusions of persecution, which responded well to pharmacological treatment, lived obsessed with the conviction that her husband's death was already near, of which she had become aware through a revelation. And another patient lived obsessed with the ever-approaching end of her son, who, as a result of a burn from an iron inflicted on him as a baby, suffered from an incurable kidney disease. In both cases, it mattered little that the years continued to pass without any major problems.

But the catastrophism of the paranoid individual does not always dwell on death. There also exists a mini-catastrophism that manifests itself in the small details of everyday life. Let us look at a brief example of it.

Paranoia. Clinical case.

- I go to bed thinking that I'm going to be late because the alarm clock won't go off, and I spend the night watching the clock.

In this paranoid patient, the inability to trust an object that had repeatedly shown signs of functioning properly was the origin of significant insomnia. And in some of the responses that paranoid individuals give in multiple-choice tests, the tendency to feel that they must face adverse circumstances and unfavorable situations is also reflected, as well as the perception that, in general, life is hard for them. In any case, harder than for others.

Guilty and Traitors

The distortion in the evaluation of reality that leads PCGs to see enemies and threats everywhere also occurs in the perception that the PCG has of its own followers. The dynamic of the "internal enemy" has two manifestations which, while being intimately related, can be clearly distinguished from one another, at least conceptually; these are guilt and betrayal. In the case of guilt, the feared being, the lurking danger, lies within the follower themselves (or PI). In the case of betrayal, it is a member of the PCG who (with or without reason) is perceived as a danger by and for the group itself. In guilt, the PI and the follower defend themselves from themselves, or from a part of themselves. In betrayal, it is the PCG that must defend itself from one or more of its members, who have become harmful to the collective. I will speak first of guilt, then of betrayal, and thirdly of some aspects common to both.

Guilt in the PI

Clinical descriptions have traditionally emphasized the fact that PIs are rather megalomaniacal subjects who, precisely, tend never to feel guilty about anything. Faced with any negative event, they would tend to project (or, what amounts to the same thing, to hurl) all blame onto others (like projectiles).

Paranoia.

"The onset of paranoia is generally seen as a gradual and insidious process. Individuals who are constantly rejected and who continually experience failures may develop a hostile attitude toward the world, express their hostility openly, and feel resentment toward others. The next step, which is critical, would be to blame others for one's own misfortunes and to imagine that they are conspiring to frustrate their desires" (76).

The paranoidized adept of the paranoidized PCG does exactly the same thing, with regard to their own misfortunes or the misfortunes of those around them; placing the blame on others.

Cult groups. Universal energy.

According to an adept's family, he has explained to them that his mother's phobia of airplanes is due to the influence of the negative magnetic field of another person.

This "attributive style" (using cognitive terminology) stands in contrast to what occurs in another psychiatric disorder, depression, in which patients do exactly the opposite: blame themselves. A research group (69) administered a questionnaire in which patients were required to explain the cause of various negative events. As might be expected, paranoid patients tended to hold others or circumstances responsible for said events, while depressive patients tended to blame themselves, effectively, as expected.

In another interesting study conducted by Lyon et al (51), patients with persecutory delusions were compared with depressive patients and healthy controls in an "attributive style" test, in which subjects were required to assign to someone the "blame" for a series of negative events and the "merit" for a series of positive events. The most significant findings were the following:

1) Delusional patients scored higher on the BDI scale (which measures depression) than healthy controls.

2) Delusional patients tended to attribute responsibility for positive events to themselves, with a score somewhat higher than that of healthy controls (which, in any case, did not reach statistical significance) and markedly higher than that of depressive patients. That is, even though delusional patients were, as a group, somewhat depressed, they did not behave in this dimension like depressive patients but rather like healthy individuals (or somewhat better).

3) As for responsibility for negative events, delusional subjects tended to attribute it to others, well above both depressed patients and controls.

In summary, delusional subjects —even when moderately depressed— attribute credit to themselves and blame to others, doing exactly the opposite of depressive patients. These results are consistent with the pride and projective style of the paranoid individual (PI).

However, the same subjects were given another test that also measured "attributional style," only in a concealed manner, disguising it as a memory test. The result changed entirely: delusional patients now behaved exactly like depressive patients, both in the sense that they attributed responsibility for negative events to themselves and in the sense that they placed the credit for positive ones on others. Or, in other words, in anonymity — when delusional patients neither know nor feel they are being observed — guilt emerges and megalomania disappears.

Guilt in the paranoid contagion group

Guilt also seems to linger within paranoid contagion groups. The paranoid contagion microgroup (mPCG) in which it plays the most well-known and best-described role is that formed by jealous husbands and their spouses. Psychological exploration of the latter reveals how extraordinarily often they feel guilty for their husbands' anger, despite the infidelities of which they are accused being unfounded; they would be guilty for not appearing sufficiently modest in their dealings with others, for failing to understand or attend to their husbands, for having lost their sexual appetite... But their abusive husbands, too, would feel guilty.

Domestic tyranny.

"[...] rarely argue that they feel good when hitting their partner. Although they accuse her and get angry with her, 'they feel guilt and remorse, feelings of inadequacy and lack of control'. The reiteration of violence only serves to deepen the negative image they have of themselves" (16).

Most observers of the cult phenomenon have stressed that these groups foster experiences of guilt and use them to subjugate and manipulate their followers. And, indeed, it is common in religiously oriented paranoid contagion groups for guilt to be valued as something desirable that the follower must learn to cultivate. A slogan of a cult group read: "You are your greatest enemy". But the blaming of followers is, by no means, exclusive to religious groups.

Leninist-sectarian groupuscule. SLA.

"Cin had instructed me on more than one occasion that I had to carefully gain control over my own mind and not allow the intrusion of negative thoughts. Those negative thoughts were the product of my past life, my bourgeois upbringing, and now, as a true revolutionary, I set about discarding those thoughts and doubts. I told myself that I did not have to think about it, not allow them to enter my consciousness. The struggle against my thoughts was harder than the constant struggle against my new surroundings" (30).

The experience of guilt requires the follower to imaginarily split off a part of themselves from the whole of their person and confront that bad part or demonic aspect as if it were a true enemy to be fought.

Sokagakkai.

"In other words, these are forces that dwell within man, that destroy life itself and deprive us of happiness. In more modern terms, these forces represent the demonic nature of life [...] When the demonic nature of a human life becomes exuberant, that life represents what is called 'evil spirits in a whirlwind'(35).

In general, the bad part overlaps with the person and the personality pre-cult. The following quotes illustrate this for us:

Cult groups. El Patriarca.

"Those who remain within the community add to their name a public mark of guilt for their past and of compliance with/recognition of their current and future hope; thus, for example, in any publication of El Patriarca we find signatures of this type: 'D. C., former drug addict rehabilitated at El Patriarca' or 'C. S., former female drug addict reintegrated at El Patriarca' (74).

Sectarian-Leninist groupuscule. SLA.

"If I could have contemplated their beliefs with contempt, they, in turn, felt the deepest contempt for my lifestyle and my convictions. Almost everything I said was white, they said was black, and they were prepared to reeducate me. To them, my values were filth. My relationship with Steven Weed had been bourgeois and sexist. He had been using and exploiting me, they said. Engagement rings were ostentatious and a symbol of male protectionism. The pleasure I felt cooking and baking was bourgeois and sexist. Marriage is a strictly middle-class institution, the enslavement of women. Monogamy was part of a typical bourgeois mentality, one that denied freedom to both men and women. In their eyes, every bit of my relationship with Steve had been bourgeois, reactionary, and contemptible. Spending money on houseplants, oriental rugs, and new furniture for our apartment had been bourgeois materialism and a squandering of money that could very well have served the poorest and most oppressed.

They were surprised by the red nail polish on my toes at the time of my 'arrest'. This was a display of capitalist narcissism. 'The poor do not paint their toenails'. My sports car was a capitalist toy and an affront to those who were dying of hunger"(30).

Unspecified cult group.

"From that experience, I began to renounce my ideas, my capacity to think, my personal experiences and my soul, and to take on the idea that, due to my middle-class background, my most primitive thoughts, ideas, and reactions were, at best, suspect, and at worst, manifestly ruinous" (84).

The motives of guilt

The reasons why the adept comes to feel guilty are manifold. It is common for a magical causal link to be established between the misfortunes that occur in one's surroundings or that befall the adept themselves, on the one hand, and insufficient submission and devotion to the leader, or the lack of resolve when it comes to carrying out their prescriptions, on the other. The blame for misfortunes, in any case, lies with the adept, for not having been a good enough adept.

Cult groups. Moonies.

"On this occasion I was too overconfident. I fell asleep and woke up abruptly. All I could see was the rear end of an enormous red truck which I was approaching at great speed. I hit the brakes, but it was too late [...].

All I could think in those moments was 'Father, forgive me' and 'Let us crush Satan'. Over and over I repeated these words in an attempt to center my mind on God and implore His forgiveness. I thought that what had happened was 'spiritual', that I had confronted Satan in the spiritual world and that I had been defeated, and that this was the cause of the accident and not the fact that I had not slept in the last two days. Like any other good member of the cult I blamed myself for not having been 'pure' enough. It never even occurred to me that I should have slept at least my usual three or four hours a night. I felt that I had been chosen by God for this holy mission and that I had failed" (29).

Cult groups. C.E.I.S.

"We were desperate -J. continues- because we all truly believed that if the Mission failed the world was going to be destroyed. Every day, upon failing to raise the required money, Boronat would tell us that such and such a disaster that had occurred in such and such a part of the world was due to our failure..." (73).

Crisis cults. The Delaware prophet (19th c.).

"The animals had disappeared from the forests, the Lord said, because of the wickedness that the Indians displayed in their new ways of life..." (42).

On other occasions the followers are made to feel guilty for the leader's anger and discomfort, which is truly terrifying when he is a semi-divine being.

Other paranoid groups. The Sebastianisms of Pernambuco (19th c.).

"On May 14, 1838, the king addressed the faithful in an exalted speech, describing the sadness of Don Sebastián, who saw how his people, weak and hypocritical, were disobeying his orders, since no blood had been shed to break the spell that weighed upon the two towers of the cathedral" (80).

The situation can be desperate when that for which one must feel guilty is something unalterable, such as race or family origins.

Sectarian-Leninist splinter group. SLA.

"For them the concept of Third World leadership was very important. They believed that only Black people and other oppressed peoples could lead the struggle for freedom. Only Third World peoples could know the correct direction that the struggle had to take at any given moment. White people were incapable of leading that struggle. Furthermore, they could not be trusted in a leadership position because, historically, they had proven themselves to be traitors to the cause of oppressed peoples. The white sisters and brothers of this combat unit were proud and felt fortunate to have the leadership and guidance of their Black General Field Marshal. They only hoped that through their determination and respect for their leader they could prove to all Black people and oppressed peoples that not all white people were the oppressor. This, of course, would be a difficult task... but they would try" (30).

Soviet Leninism.

"Lenin's origins on his mother's side were far from 'proletarian,' a fact that underscores the absurdity of the Bolshevik practice of evaluating people by their social class. This criterion reached grotesque proportions in the twenties and thirties, when there were people who went so far as to commit suicide upon discovering that their past concealed a 'bourgeois' or a 'landowner.' Of course, the party leaders were exempted as a 'revolutionary exception'" (89).

Nor is it possible to avoid certain feelings or thoughts, which the paranoid contagion group can transform into a source of guilt.

Sectarian groups. Community Chapel.

"Members were told that when they saw their spouses dancing intimately with another person, they should feel no jealousy, no resentment, no discomfort. The natural tendency in that situation is to feel possessive of one's spouse. However, when they experienced those feelings, they were accused of having a demon of jealousy"(24).

The deluded guilt

Just as the women of jealous abusers feel guilty for having done something they know they have not done, the followers of cult groups may feel the same absurd guilt over accusations that are nothing more thangroundless whims of the leader but which, coming from whom they come from, enjoy maximum credibility in their circle.

Cult groups. Reverend Jones's People's Temple.

"It was forbidden to resist those punishments. Despite the fact that Houston continued with his multiple jobs and handed over his earnings to the Temple's coffers, Reverend Jones publicly accused him of being a drug addict, because he had fallen asleep during one of the Temple's meetings, which usually lasted all night"(41).

Cult groups.River of Life Ministries.

"The experiences of MaryAnn were even more traumatic than those of Pablo. Having been accused of allying herself with 'the spirit of Jezebel that controls every woman unless she submits to the spirit of God in her husband,' MaryAnn was isolated from Pablo and the children. She was dressed in 'sackcloth and ashes' by Mitchell, was accused of being a seductress and temptress, was not allowed to bathe, was forced to perform hard physical labor under the desert sun, and was compelled to confess that she had lustful thoughts about all men and boys, including her own son" (24).

The adept, drawing on their memories, may know that what they are accused of is untrue, but the group as a whole will not doubt the veracity of the accusations made by their leader. And since the entirety of their social environment is pointing the accusatory finger, the adept may come to doubt their own memory. When paranoidization is more extreme — and consequently the greater the loss of the sense of reality — these accusations of errors or sins committed in the past come to be believed even by the accused themselves, even though they are in fact false. We already know that this curious phenomenon occurred as a consequence of the extremely severe procedures of Maoist reeducation.

The following quotation shows the case of a family that was active in a cult group. The delusional memories appeared in one of the family members while participating in a group meeting. They would subsequently spread to the entire family unit, justifying a diagnosis of folie à famille.

Folie à famille. Clinical case.

"Mr. Ingram had been raised Catholic, had studied for some time at the seminary, and had converted to fundamentalism more than a decade before the investigation began. The Ingram family were fervent members of a fundamentalist charismatic Christian denomination, which believed in the literal presence of Satan on Earth, in demons and demonic possessions. Physical and mental illness, fortune, etc., were attributed to satanic influence. Satan had the power of deception (that is, of taking control of a person's mind and causing the individual to be unaware of having carried out the acts that Satan has inspired in them). Beliefs of this kind are not uncommon in some fundamentalist congregations.

[...] According to his children, Mr. Ingram was authoritarian, too focused on his political career, and was seen as cold and distant.

[...] in September 1988, at a retreat promoted by the church with the goal of encouraging women to reveal abuse, Ericka Ingram, 22 years old, accused her father of having raped her when she was a child. In the following weeks, Ericka escalated her allegations and claimed that her father had recently been raping her almost every night. For the first time in her life, she moved out of the family home and into the house of a church family. The police contacted Ericka in November 1988. She accused Mr. Ingram and two of his friends of sexual assault and claimed that her father had been raping her more or less continuously since she was 5 years old.

Ericka's sister, Ericka, Julie, also attended the retreat and became aware of Ericka's accusation. She left the family home shortly after her sister. Julie first claimed she had been raped in a letter to her teacher. As part of her excuse for recent misconduct at school, she explained that the cause was that she had been raped at the age of four. Julie claimed that all the men who attended the Saturday night poker game entered her room, one or two at a time, and raped her while her father watched.

[...] Suspected only of rape when first interrogated in November, the pseudomemories recounted by Mr. Ingram led to him being charged with many other crimes. He was the first in the family to suggest anything related to a satanic cult. This occurred in response to suggestions made by a psychologist. In conjunction with the continued pressure from detectives and the influence of several counselors, the pseudomemories allowed Mr. Ingram to confess to rapes, assaults, child sexual abuse, and participation in a satanic cult that had allegedly murdered 25 babies.

[...] After some weeks since the interrogation of Mr. Ingram had begun, his pseudomemories convinced the investigators that he belonged to a satanic cult. The investigators sought to obtain confirmation of the cult's existence from Mr. Ingram's daughters. At first the attempts failed, despite repeated questioning. After some weeks of pressure, Ericka and Julie accepted the existence of the cult and that they had been its victims for more than a decade. Ericka claimed that the cult was still active when she left the family home in September 1988.

In a series of revelations that began in January of '89, the daughters introduced events consistent with the satanic cult stories circulating throughout the country: they claimed to have witnessed the murder of 25 children and at least 1 adult; to have been tortured; marked with knives and fire; raped; to have forced Erikca to abort a near-term fetus; and to have observed the mutilation of fetuses and dead babies. Once she had begun to tell stories about the cult, she claimed that it was making attempts on her life.

[...] For 6 months (from December of '88 to May of '89) Mr. Ingram was convinced of the validity of his pseudomemories. They provided him with memories that were at most isolated and fragmentary. He was unable to recall more than brief scenes from a supposed 17-year criminal career that would have ended with his arrest. The satanic cult to which he supposedly belonged was, according to one daughter, actively attempting to murder her. Although Mr. Ingram accepted the trance-induced images as true memories, he was unable to understand why he could only remember a small portion of his alleged crimes. As a result of the constant reinforcement from the detectives, his pastor, and two psychologists, Mr. Ingram's belief in his own guilt was so intense that after 5 months he was willing to plead guilty. His counselors assured him that his full memory would return if he firmly maintained his admission of guilt.

After having pleaded guilty in May of '89, the detectives, the pastor, and the psychologists stopped visiting and working with him. When their visits ended, so did the social reinforcements that sustained his doubts. Mr. Ingram's faith in his own guilt deteriorated within a month" (64).

From guilt to betrayal

The Lyon experiment to which I have alluded earlier suggests that IPs tend to blame themselves — for misfortunes and failures — more than "normal" people do, but that, nevertheless, in relation to others, they conceal said responsibility.

Abusive husbands, according to several authors, feel genuinely guilty about their violent episodes, but neither do they acknowledge it…

Domestic tyranny.

"Aggressors frequently feel desperate, but it is exceptional for them to manifest these feelings, as for them it would mean stepping outside the established patterns of the culturally accepted male ideal" (16).

(…) nor do they act accordingly.

Domestic tyranny.

"Few are those who accept assistance because they perceive themselves as having a problem" (16).

Given that —especially in the face of misfortune— there must always be someone responsible, and given that the IP resists openly assuming their responsibility, they have no choice but to transfer it to others.

Paranoia. Clinical case.

"A woman complained bitterly that her husband spent every evening from 7 to 10 in a bar. This was true, but she omitted to mention that when her husband arrived home from work each evening at 5:30, he would find her drunk and would endure an hour and a half of humiliations and false accusations that she directed at him. She would usually end her tirade by throwing him out of the house and locking the door (she weighed 30 kg. more than he did). The husband would return home at 10:30 because by then she was already asleep" (82).

In this way, the responsibility for the failing marriage is placed entirely on the husband, at least in the eyes of the evaluating professional.

Acting in exactly the same way as IPs, the paranoid contagion group is also particularly prone to making false (or erroneous) accusations insofar as, by placing the blame on one of its members, it preserves its good image: that of the group itself and also that of the leader. A good image always constitutes a maximum priority, to the point that the paranoid contagion group goes so far as to sacrifice a part of itself by transferring the guilt/responsibility to one of its members.

Maoist Leninism.

"Bian had joined the Communists during the war, but in doing so he discovered that his poetry was considered incompatible with the revolution, which sought propaganda rather than self-expression. Part of his mind accepted this, but he could not help becoming embittered and succumbing to depression. He began to think that he would never be able to write again, and yet —he said— he did not feel capable of living without his poetry either.

His suicide attempt fell like a bombshell on the Party. It was counterproductive for its image that someone could feel so disillusioned with the Liberation as to attempt to take his own life. Bian worked in Jinzhou as a teacher at the Party cadres' school, many of whom were illiterate. The Party's school organization ordered an investigation and concluded that Bian had attempted to kill himself because of the unrequited love he felt... for my mother. In its criticism meetings, the Women's Federation suggested that my mother had given Bian hope only to then spurn him in favor of a more substantial catch: my father. My mother was furious and demanded that they present evidence of such an accusation. Needless to say, such evidence could never be produced" (36).

The identification of traitors can likewise serve to preserve the all-powerful image of the leader when events do not unfold as expected.

Nazism.

"He finally decided to telegraph Hitler... to ask whether he agreed to Göering taking overall leadership of the Reich... Hitler initially reacted very calmly to the telegram but Bormann managed to convince him that a coup d'état was being planned. Speer, present in Hitler's bunker at that moment, describes the fit of rage that followed: 'With a red and contorted face and glassy eyes Hitler snapped: 'I already knew it. I knew that Göering is lazy and corrupt. He let the Luftwaffe go to ruin. He is corrupt, and through his example, corruption has spread throughout this country..." (87).

Thus, on the outside, the one to blame for the difficulties the domestic tyrant's family is going through is the woman, for being unfaithful or lazy or whatever, the one responsible for the suicide of a prominent communist is another wicked woman who had seduced him, and the blame for the German defeat lies not with the one who made the great strategic decisions, but with the one who faithfully carried them out…

Traitors

Betrayal is a dynamic closely related to blame and constitutes one of the obsessions of the paranoid personality.

Paranoid personality.

"Others' loyalty may be questioned and they always expect betrayal" (1).

Soviet Leninism.

"Any real or imagined threat that arose in the course of those years was invariably attributed to a certain 'counter-revolutionary activity by the Mensheviks', ensuring harsher treatment for all of them" (89).

Among the typical themes of paranoid delusions, one of the most frequent is that of infidelity sexual (betrayal is nothing more than the breaking of a commitment of fidelity). These are the poorly named delusions of jealousy, which can reach grotesque extremes.

Paranoia. Clinical case.

- There was a period when I believed my wife was sleeping with my father.

For sectarian and totalitarian leaders, traitors often have even more importance than external enemies.

Nazism.

"The protests of the Reich Government are unsuccessful. Then, the Reich Chancellor, Cuno, exhorts the population of the Ruhr basin to passive resistance against French troops and authorities. Only the work necessary for the supply of the population must be carried out, but not a finger must be lifted for the French and Belgians! The people are almost unanimously in favor of these demands, backing the Government. This constitutes a fact never seen in the postwar period.

Only one person is not in agreement, precisely the one from whom nobody would have expected it: the leader of the NSDAP, Hitler. In his meetings he declares: 'We must not cry down with France, but down with the November traitors! They have led the fatherland to this degrading situation. The main enemy of the German people is in Berlin" (93).

For paranoid contagion groups, betrayal is, from least to greatest, an obsessive preoccupation, a suspicion, and, in the worst of cases, a conviction. The expectation of betrayal leads to an apprehensive and vigilant attitude toward the possible emergence of internal enemies.

Sokagakkai.

"There is nothing more dangerous for an organization than agitators, and especially for a church or a group whose foundation rests on ideological or philosophical principles"(34).

In some PAs, the struggle against this internal enemy (traitors and also those guilty of all manner of transgressions) absorbs the bulk of "enemy behavior," to the detriment of identifying and opposing external enemies. This orientation contributes to limiting conflicts with the surrounding environment and gives the group a peaceful appearance that does not correspond to reality. Something similar often occurs with the families of certain zealots and domestic tyrants.

Among the most characteristic accusations is that of being a false member of the group, of actually belonging to another group, and of having no other intention than to undermine it from within.

Sectarian groups. TFP.

"The Catholic Church is in the hands of Freemasonry. John Paul II is a Freemason" (72).

Other paranoid groups.

"Myers describes in detail the evolution and beliefs of the Society of Agnostics and the American Protective Association which, in the mid-nineteenth century, set out to fight the 'Catholic conspiracy.' These organizations were founded by sensationalists of the type of Edward Judson, with an evident emotional instability in their private lives and especially with an aggressiveness that was unleashed very easily. These organizations reached conclusions such as the following: Catholic priests tortured those who disagreed with them; priests urged American girls to enter convents where they would later be sexually molested; the Catholic Church was the most important political force in the world; the Jesuits were responsible for the assassination of Abraham Lincoln and, as the culminating point of persecutory impulses, Catholics were so skillful that they had managed to infiltrate themselves among the leaders of these organizations destined to fight against the conspiracy" (82).

One path that the PCG can take in its dynamic of inventing traitors, in which the leader always plays a prominent role, is the creation of the figure of a great traitor to whom an excessive importance is attributed and who is held responsible for all the calamities the group may go through.

Folie à famille. The Iranian family.

"[...] her older brother and the Iranian government were oppressing her close family and infiltrating an opposition party to persecute them" (56).

Sokagakkai.

"On the day of his inauguration as second president of the Soka Gakkai, Toda directed the following question to the administrative committee of the Head Temple:

'I have heard that the wicked priest Jiko Kasahara, who advocated the theory of shimpon busshaku, harassed the high priest Nikkyo and indirectly caused the persecution suffered by the Soka Gakkai in wartime, is still a member of the Nichiren Shoshu clergy. I wish to know whether this is so. The Soka Gakkai has embarked on an intense campaign for the people of Japan to embrace the true faith. I sincerely believe that the Head Temple understands and approves of our objective and that its authorities will be able to recognize that a man like Kasahara represents a danger to our cause" (34).

The great traitor is usually some figure of relevance within the group, who may have overshadowed the leader or even competed with him for power. In the history of Leninism, the role of great traitor was played by Trotsky, Stalin's great enemy. While it is true that an open confrontation existed between the two figures, which ended with the victory of the latter and the assassination of the former, Trotsky was transformed into the chieftain of a conspiracy whose activities were often completely imaginary. The state of collective paranoidization turned any dissidence into proof of Trotskyism, and the extermination of Trotskyism constituted one of the regime's main obsessions.

Soviet Leninism.

"The relations between Nikolai Bukharin, the Marxist theorist and Bolshevik economist, and the all-powerful Stalin —who died 40 years ago now— oscillated with the ideas that both defended throughout their lives. Allied at first —at Lenin's death in 1924, when Bukharin was defending the New Economic Policy, which Stalin used to undermine Trotsky and Zinoviev— they became enemies from 1928 onward, when the dictator reversed course and reinforced the collectivization that his enemies had previously championed. Bukharin was denounced for opposing Stalin's plans, lost his post in the Comintern, and was expelled from the Politburo. It was of no use that he recanted and that Stalin made the gesture of readmitting him. In January 1937 he was arrested and expelled from the Communist Party, as a Trotskyist. In March 1938 he was tried for 'counter-revolutionary activities and espionage' and was condemned and executed" (79).

Soviet Leninism.

"d) If, by some miracle, my life is spared, I ask (although I should speak of it with my wife):

- Exile myself in America for a few years. Points in favor: I could organize a campaign about the trials, I could wage a fight to the death against Trotsky, I could attract broad sectors of undecided intellectuals, I would be an anti-Trotsky de facto and I would play the role with great energy and even enthusiasm; as an additional guarantee, I could be escorted by a member of the Cheka, of considerable prestige, and you could keep my wife for six months until I had demonstrated in practice that I am capable of smashing Trotsky and others in the face" (79).

Outside the Soviet Union, the internal purges of various communist parties were also carried out with the aim of ridding themselves of Trotskyist elements, even where there was no hint of Trotskyism.

Even if the fabrication of internal enemies is not a conscious policy used by the group's leader to serve his own ends, the fact remains that the identification and elimination of traitors allows him to rid himself of competitors and reinforce his own power and the pyramidal structure of the group.

Maoist Leninism.

"Mao withdraws, relinquishes power, but returns as the avenging angel. He never forgives. The Cultural Revolution is an ego reaction, his settling of scores: he sends Deng Xiaoping off to manufacture tractor parts, Deng's son is thrown out of a fourth-floor window at Peking University by bands of red guards, President Liu Shaoqi is locked in a wretched cell and left to die like a dog. 'And we all ate from the same pot,' lamented a soldier of the Long March" (48).

There is no doubt that these behaviors give the impression that the leader (Mao) simply limited himself to inventing pretexts with which to wriggle free from his rivals. But the biography of the Great Helmsman leads us to think that he truly was convinced that he was the sole safeguard of revolutionary principles, being equally convinced that within the CCP itself a capitulation in the socialist revolution was being driven forward that would ultimately lead to the return of capitalism. The Cultural Revolution was something more than an instrument in Mao's personal struggle for power; it was an operation to exterminate the traitors to revolutionary purity.

Another consequence of the dynamic of identifying traitors (and their subsequent punishment) is that it helps to maintain discipline among the paranoid contagion groups which, as I will discuss later, are groups that are, in and of themselves, hyper-hierarchical. It is around those more unruly and independent members that rumors are generated which incriminate them in supposedly seditious activities, rumors that end up being finally accepted as facts. And it is that paranoid thinking equates simple disobedience with treason. The act of not obeying — for the domestic tyrant, for the sectarian leader, for the totalitarian caudillo — means an attack and an offense.

Nationalist Utopia. The social contract.

"Moreover, every wrongdoer, by attacking social right, becomes through his crimes a rebel and a traitor to the homeland; he ceases to be a member of it by violating its laws, and makes war upon it" (78).

Common elements of guilt and treason

With guilt and treason being so ever-present, paranoid contagion groups expend a great deal of energy in their detection and correction. In some groups, the struggle against the faults, errors, and shortcomings of each individual is a shared task. Everyone is obliged to watch over the others and to criticize the errors observed, so that the one guilty of having committed them may become aware of them and correct them.

Maoist Leninism.

"In each unit of the army, a movement of support for the cadres and concern for the soldiers must be deployed, calling on the cadres to show concern for the soldiers and on the soldiers to support the cadres. Both sides must frankly point out each other's defects and errors, and correct them promptly. In this way, excellent internal unity will be achieved" (52).

What actually took place was a climate of sullen tension, reticence, distrust, and pettiness, in which personal resentments and antipathies were disguised as disinterested concern for fellow comrades. But let us continue examining examples of this dynamic.

Leninism. Democratic Workers Party.

"In the mid-seventies, when I joined a communist political group, the Democratic Workers Party (which I will refer to as 'the party') was thirty-five years old. Just as I had tried to be a 'good boy' during my Catholic upbringing, I wanted to be an excellent communist: it was a way of confronting my sense of unworthiness. We were entirely devoted to the cause of the oppressed. We struggled to live according to an impossible ideal, and in order to change ourselves, we employed the most extreme criticism over the smallest mistakes or over 'incorrect' attitudes" (84).

For Mao, criticism was not only meant to eradicate errors but to prevent them, by first correcting the personal flaws that gave rise to them.

Maoist Leninism.

"Criticism must be made in a timely manner; one must not fall into the habit of criticizing only after the facts have already taken place" (52).

With one's own personal defects, and with those of others, the IGP does the same as with enemies strictu sensu: fight to put an end to them.

Sectarian-Leninist groupuscule. SLA.

"They consumed an enormous amount of time in meetings, either planning future 'actions,' or 'fighting' in criticisms of one another to make each of them better comrades,better soldiers"(30).

The insistence on perfecting others leads to excessive attention to small details, which will necessarily undermine the spontaneity of interpersonal relationships.

Sectarian groups. TFP.

"In the organization's headquarters, an institutionalized form of public criticism is practiced at the end of the day.

Accuser:

- I request permission to make an accusation.

Person in charge:

- It is authorized.

Accuser:

- I accuse Mr. So-and-so.

So-and-so:

- Presto sum

Accuser:

- Mr. So-and-so has done or has not done this or that...

The accusations range from lack of enthusiasm in street proselytizing to having skipped one's turn to use the bathroom..." (72).

To facilitate criticism, the paranoid contagion group equips itself with a typology of errors and blameworthy behaviors, which, when all is said and done, makes it possible to turn into a guilty party anyone who is simply a normal, ordinary person.

Maoist Leninism.

"Diseases such as dogmatism, empiricism, authoritarianism, tailism, sectarianism, bureaucratism and arrogance in work are invariably harmful and intolerable, and anyone who suffers from them must overcome them, because they distance us from the masses" (52).

Mutual criticism generates significant psychological pressure on members and constitutes a genuine source of suffering. The following quotation gives us some sense of this.

Leninist-sectarian groupuscule. SLA.

"As if the long days were not enough, the SLA devoted its afternoons and evenings to meetings of one kind or another, particularly those they called 'criticism/self-criticism meetings.' It was an integral part of cell life. Seated on the floor in a circle, Cin invited each person to criticize any other with regard to their actions and attitudes, but only in a constructive way. The goal was to help one another be better comrades, better revolutionaries, better soldiers. It was also an opportunity for each person to criticize themselves, to bring up anything problematic, and to ask for the help of others in overcoming shortcomings and doubts. The atmosphere was always serious and formal.

The meetings went on for hours and were a genuine ordeal for the nerves" (30).

Torture that, of course, cannot be recognized as such.

Leninist-sectarian groupuscule. SLA.

"Unfortunately, in my capacity as the latest recruit, I was the most frequent target of criticism. I was not serious enough in training. I did not try hard enough. I was lazy and careless in the training exercises. My attitude was not positive enough. I did not show enough comradeship with the sisters and brothers. I did not contribute enough to the functioning of the cell.

My role in this ritual was to show myself humbly in agreement with these sincere criticisms and to promise that I would try to correct my failings. I threw myself into the 'self-critical' aspect of the meeting. I echoed their criticisms back to them in the form of self-criticisms. I did not have enough determination, my attitude was not positive enough. I explained that I had not tried hard enough to recover from my confinement and that I had difficulty concentrating for long periods of time. I asked for forgiveness and promised to fight (a favorite word) to overcome my failings. Finally, I thanked my comrades for trying to help me" (30).

Very close to criticism is denunciation, in which the culpable act or betrayal is not communicated to the one who commits it but to the hierarchical superior. Denunciation tends to be encouraged and widely established in totalitarian regimes.

Soviet Leninism.

"[...] Lenin taught us that every party member must be an agent of the Cheka, that is to say that we must observe and report… I believe that every party member should report. If we suffer from anything it is not from denunciations, but from the lack of them. We can be the best of friends, but when one begins to dissent in politics we must not only end the friendship: we must go one step further and report" (89).

Sectarian groups. Community Chapel.

"Barnett instituted 'Operation Rescue' by which members were instructed to report the failings of others to the pastor" (24).

German Leninism.

"At the 1980 Winter Games, in Lake Placid (USA), 35 of the 176 athletes present were police informants, as were 10 of the 60 managers, 16 of the 70 officials, and 9 of the 45 journalists" (44).

The need to have knowledge of guilt and betrayals leads to the carrying out of interrogations, typical of totalitarian regimes but also frequent in sectarian groups.

Sectarian groups. Truth Station.

"Gretchen described to me the long group meetings in a packed hall where the leader would spend hours subjecting followers to the 'hot seat,' where he would insult and humiliate them while everyone else watched. 'You were not allowed to get up to go to the bathroom during the meeting. Everyone had to stay and be part of the process,' Gretchen told me. He intended for members to believe that the 'sin' of each of them had to be 'brought to light' in order to destroy it. Nobody knew who would be next to sit in the hot seat, and everyone inwardly breathed a sigh of relief when someone else was called" (29).

Interrogations are a characteristic practice of domestic tyrants (on account of alleged acts of disobedience) and most especially of jealous husbands, who subject their spouses to endless sessions of questioning or, rather, of demands that they acknowledge their betrayals, applying the principle of presumption of guilt.

Jealous ones.

"[...] the jealous one, who at the height of the simulated understanding he displays can assert: 'You say you do not love him, do not desire him, and I grant you that you believe you do not love him and do not desire him, because you cannot accept it, but I do know that you desire him, even if you neither admit it to me nor wish to admit it to yourself" (12).

The presumption of guilt justifies the resort to violence in interrogations, and violence, in turn, leads the victim to acknowledge having committed acts that they have not in reality committed.

Maoist Leninism.

"Wang the Bearded, whose real name was Wang Hui, was already over sixty years old [in 1955] and had been cutting Mao's hair since the late 1930s. When in 1942 the party decided to carry out a 'rectification campaign', as Mao later told me, Wang was accused of some kind of deception against the party. As this campaign against hidden traitors advanced and the accused were forced to confess, Wang had to acknowledge that he was a murderer and that he had attempted to kill Mao with his razor" (21).

Some cults use methods to spy on and monitor their own members, such as reading correspondence or installing cameras. The need to closely surveil one's surroundings is, in fact, a characteristic that has been attributed to the paranoid personality.

Paranoid personality.

"Tends to be controlling" (90).

But it is in totalitarian regimes where this dynamic reaches its most complete expression, especially with the creation of professionalized bodies dedicated to that task. Their activity and inquisitorial zeal, though invisible, becomes omnipresent.

Nazism.

"Mr. Gutterer should ask the Gestapo to continue investigating without cease until the source of the rumors and false reports that have been circulating in Kiel for some time is discovered"(5).

What consequences derive for the guilty-traitor from his sorry condition? How does the group react toward those of its members it identifies as guilty and traitors? In the first place, it demands repentance from them, which alludes both to the acknowledgment of their guilt and to the necessary pain felt on account of it.

Sokagakkai.

"Not long ago, a couple who had joined barely two months earlier had a trivial quarrel. The wife was more devout than the husband. When the dispute reached its climax, the man took the Gohonzon and tore it in two pieces. The wife was terribly distressed when she came to tell me what had happened. We went to the temple,we invoked daimoku with repentance, and left the broken Gohonzon with a priest for safekeeping"(34).

Cult groups.Church of Bible Understanding.

"In those meetings, 'perceiving and pointing out the wrongful conduct of others was how we demonstrated our desire to be with Jesus, because Jesus hated the sin, but not the sinner. It always ended with verbal executions that led to interruptions and prolonged silences until the early hours of the morning.' Since women, according to Traill, were by nature manipulative, devious andscheming, they were frequently the targets of these late-night confrontations. Then, according to Betty, each woman had 'to ask for forgiveness in a way that everyone would believe her, for whatever horrible crime she had been accused of and to avoid being lynched.' In 1988 a ritual was instituted in which members who were required to 'amend their conduct' before the groupneeded to obtain four or five witnesses to vouch for their sincerity. Insincerity led to repeated humiliations and/or expulsion from the group"(24).

Secondly, the guilty-traitors deserve expulsion, which for the militant of the PCG represents a true tragedy.

Nationalist utopia. The social contract.

"The preservation of the State is then incompatible with his own preservation; one of the two must perish, and when the death penalty is applied to the criminal, the homeland treats him more as an enemy than as a citizen. The trial and the judgment constitute the proof and the declaration that he has violated the social contract, and, consequently, that he has ceased to be a member of the State. Now, recognized as such he must be suppressed by means of banishment as a violator of the pact, or with death as a public enemy, for such an enemy is not a moral person, but a man, and in that case the law of war establishes the right to kill the vanquished" (78).

Sokagakkai.

"Furthermore, this volume recounts the captivating story of a Buddhist priest expelled from the clergy, of a perverse man who conspired to break the harmony between the religious members and the lay members of Nichiren Shoshu, and of how the pure faith of men restored that harmony" (34).

In sectarian groups, it is common to demand of the adherents that they treat as dead the expelled subject and maintain no dealings with him whatsoever. Something similar occurs in the SPs.

Nazism.

"The Prince of Biesterfeld must never be spoken of again, because that traitor to his homeland does not deserve our attention" (5).

Internal enemies and the guilty also deserve to be punished.

Maoist Leninism.

"Well, right here we will find many of the keys to venturing an answer: There is no doubt that the Cultural Revolution was a tremendous catastrophe, but for whom? First and foremost for the immense majority of the current shadow gerontocracy of the CCP, with Den Xiaoping at the helm. They were the ones who found themselves criticized and removed from their high positions, and forced to work in 'despicable' posts, as workers or peasants, for a time. The aim of this (these were the then official theses, with surprising Christian-medieval connotations) was for them to regain contact with the harsh reality of physical labor, as an educational-therapeutic measure for their ideological reform" (70).

Sectarian groups. TFP.

"The camaldule is an institution of great severity that entails absolute seclusion and silence. Those who enter it are usually people who have committed grave sins, such as having abandoned (temporarily) the organization, sexual sins, etc." (72).

The experience of guilt means that these punishments are remarkably well tolerated.

Domestic tyranny.

"[...] she thinks that she is to blame for what is happening to her and that she deserves it" (50).

The name sicarii derives from sica, the curved dagger with which those revolutionary-bandits murdered those other Jews whom they viewed as traitors: the supporters of peace with the Romans (little did it matter that this option was, by far, the majority one among the Jewish inhabitants of occupied Palestine). The death penalty is, obviously, the most severe form of punishment for the guilty and traitors (in this case, for a crime of opinion).

The close surveillance to which the adepts subject one another, the public and obligatory self-accusations, the ease with which the accusation of treason and conspiracy can fall upon any member of the group, without the accused being able to do anything to prevent it, bring about in the paranoid contagion group a climate of unease and discomfort, which is concealed behind the apparent camaraderie and happiness that reigns in the group. In the best of cases it is simply that: a faint mist of mistrust that each member keeps to themselves. In the worst, when the dynamic of guilt and betrayal runs unchecked, persecutions and indiscriminate repression ensue.

Nazism.

"In 1933, shortly after Hitler's rise to power, the SA, who suddenly find themselves attacked neither by the police nor by political enemies, are directed toward terrorism. The auxiliary police of the SA detain, after the Reichstag fire, without rhyme or reason, people of different political ideologies. The number of arrests is large, arbitrariness has free rein. Often a person is arrested simply because an envious neighbor has denounced them, or because a member of the SA wants to settle a personal score..." (93).

Anabaptist messianisms. John of Leiden (16th century).

"Meanwhile, Jan Bockelson [John of Leiden] multiplies the executions and tortures. Everyone becomes in his eyes a potential traitor" (8).

In Maoist China, as we already know, purges and mass cleansing operations of traitors were repeated periodically, following well-established patterns. The last of such purges was the most indiscriminate, its target being the Communist Party itself.

Maoist Leninism.

"Things went worse: In the ten years of the Cultural Revolution (later called in China 'years of chaos') between eight and ten million people were eliminated and some two hundred million were arrested. This amounts to one percent of the population murdered and twenty-five percent persecuted"77).

Sectarian groups, of smaller size, can also organize their own healthy purges.

Sectarian groups. Shilo.

"Periods of disagreement, rumors, or unrest were followed by purges. The threat of being excommunicated and expelled from the kingdom resulted in a renewal of loyalties. The purges were called 'the sifting process' or 'time of cleansing.'Standord sought only what was 'just, clear, and terrible.' The first purge in 1890 aimed to purify the members. The purge was an unsparing examination of character and soul. Having passed the test, one received a ticket to attend a special service. The membersle placed supreme value on the tickets[...] The purges lasted weeks, with long hours of prayer and fasting followed by intense interrogations. Only those who submitted without defending themselves were accepted"(24).

The hostile universe

Enemies multiply

It is well known that paranoid patients with persecutory delusions start from a small core of supposed persecutors, but tend to expand, over time, the field of those they include among their enemies.

Delusion of grievance.

"[...] the patients enlarge the circle of their grievances and their accusations: without losing sight of the reparation they demand, they wander from lawsuit to lawsuit, and the more their demands are dismissed, the greater the scope these take on; injustices accumulate, the number of bribed judges, unworthy lawyers, and false witnesses never ceases to grow" (81).

This expansion is also characteristic of paranoid contagion groups. Nazism identified as Jews those who professed that religion, and their descendants, but the concept of Jew would end up being broadened.

Nazism.

"In his book Jews Are Watching You, whose title imitates that of Paul Eipper Animals Are Watching You, Doctor Johann von Leers distinguishes Jews of blood, Jews of deception, Jews of imposture, Jews of decomposition, Jews of art, and Jews of money, without all the persons denigrated being truly members of the Jewish race" (93).

Consequently, paranoid activation ultimately leads to a large number of identified enemies. This tendency is observed in the obsessive personality and in cult groups.

Sokagakkai.

"You, President Toda, for being the great general of the Last Days of the Law, find yourself surrounded by countless enemies" (34).

Cult groups. Reverend Jones's People's Temple.

"He was the paranoid messiah of a congregation that was at once terrified and devoted, whose end he predicted every night, at the hands of dark and threatening forces: the CIA, the Ku-Klux-Klan, racism, fascism, and nuclear holocaust" (41).

States of nationalist exaltation apparently also produced a drift that led Nation-States toward confrontation with a growing number of enemies, both internal and external: linguistic minorities, Jews, communists, neighboring nations...

The enemies change

Paranoia.

"The development of this illness always follows a very slow course. The onset, which often takes several years, consists of mild depressions, suspiciousness, vague physical complaints and hypochondriacal apprehensions" (40).

Hypochondriacal apprehensions could mark not only the onset of the illness, but also the onset of improvement or, at least, the onset of the possibility of establishing a certain therapeutic alliance.

Paranoia.

"Experience shows that mediation with the paranoid individual becomes possible when one can begin to speak about their body, to induce a hypochondriacal discourse" (60).

Although psychiatrists tend to view the various delusional contents as distinct illnesses (jealousy delusions, querulous delusions, etc.), patient and prolonged clinical observation suggests that, with a certain frequency, paranoid contents — delusional and non-delusional — succeed one another, being less static than we imagine them to be. External enemies, traitors, catastrophes, illnesses (deluded about, suspected, or feared) succeed and overlap one another in the universe of the paranoid individual. None of which prevents a particular content from usually predominating over the others, occupying the foreground of clinical relevance.

Folie à deux. Clinical case.

"The patient, 75 years of age, lived in a small rural locality in north-central Italy, with a 55-year-old daughter, a son-in-law, and a 30-year-old niece.

[...] The patient reported that her home and her body were infested with parasites (bugs, flies, and other insects) that had subsequently affected other members of the family. The infestation had allegedly begun in early August of the previous year following an insect bite on the patient's arm. At that moment, she had noticed something luminous, like a small piece of tin foil, which had penetrated her skin and had begun to proliferate. The patient maintained that her back was covered in eggs that her daughter had attempted to remove on numerous occasions with a pair of eyebrow tweezers.

[...] After contacting the family members on numerous occasions, the daughter turned out to fully support the patient's delusional ideas, while the son-in-law cooperated partially

The reported the presence of a strong bond between the mother and the daughter, maintaining that they had initially considered him responsible for the infestation (it had been he who brought the parasites home from the construction site where he worked)" (13).

But the following detail should not go unnoticed.

Folie à deux. Clinical case.

"Furthermore. He revealed that his wife had been convinced for many years (and her mother fully backed her up in this regard) that he was cheating on her" (13).

The same plasticity of persecutory content characterizes cult leaders. The group of followers who gathered around Charles Manson attempted to save the planet from ecological catastrophe. A few years later, they were hiding on a farm convinced that Black people were going to carry out a mass slaughter of white citizens from which they would be the only survivors! Tata Dios, the gaucho warlord whose cult continued long after his death, began his career as a thaumaturgic healer and ended it in his attempt to eliminate all foreigners (mainly Italians), Freemasons, and government officials in the city of Tandil.

Generalized evil

As paranoidization advances, the enemies of the paranoid contagion group, increasingly numerous, tend to become omnipresent.

Lasègue's persecution delusion. Clinical case.

"She fled her home because her husband, a lawyer, treated her as a madwoman, and no longer provided the necessary income for the household. She has fallen out with her children, whom she refuses to see. 'I have spent a long time, she says, hearing without understanding; now I understand everything; I am accused of being a thief, a public woman; they persecute me with the most unbecoming words. When a new tenant comes to the house, he joins my enemies to discredit me. The shopkeepers in the area talk about me under my window; I am insulted everywhere, and these are not imaginings. I reported to the authorities who my persecutors are; it is the coffer-maker who shakes his boxes to mock me; when he stops nailing, the boys call me a wretch. The neighbors say: she does nothing, she pretends to work; they sing insulting songs such as: my Lively One; they hang their trousers out of the windows to make dummies that frighten me. I receive letters through somnambulism; my daughter-in-law wrote me one in which there were dots to intimidate me'(46).

Sectarian groups. TFP.

"But, moreover, as militant Catholics, dedicated to the defense of the basic principles of Christian civilization in the face ofthe revolutionary escalation, which manifests itself in every aspect of national life, religious and temporal, public and private, we could not fail to give this tribute a reparatory character as well"(15).

So a point is reached at which the whole world is hostile, with none being trustworthy save the remaining members of the group.

Sectarian groups. Boston Church of Christ.

"I wanted to know whether George had expressed any dissatisfaction or disillusionment regarding the group. No, the O'Briens replied, absolutely none. Apparently, he was totally committed.He only trusted the people in the group. He had been programmed to think that everyone else was 'dead,' which was equivalent to 'not spiritual"(29).

Sectarian groups. The Sullivanians.

"The first line of a book written by Saul was that 'The world is a dangerous place', and the more we remained under his control, the more we acted as if it were true. The only place that seemed safe was the group" (84).

Or, in any case, the world becomes divided into two camps; that of good (formed by the paranoid contagion group itself and its friends and allies, or those it believes itself to represent) and that of the enemies.

Maoist Leninism.

"Our enemies are all those who are in league with imperialism: the military warlords, the bureaucrats, the comprador bourgeoisie, the class of great landowners and the reactionary sector of the intelligentsia subordinated to them... Our closest friends are the semi-proletariat in its entirety and the petty bourgeoisie" (66).

Turkish Leninism.

"Our elders, the people who were in the twilight of their lives. The people who ran the country. The people who governed. Those responsible for the economy, industry, architecture, the Government, the opposition, the army... angry people, with no sense of humor, who did not hesitate, who never joked [...] Little by little, they all became enemies, except for the workers and peasants, whom we had never known and about whom we knew very little. The police were the enemy. The State was the enemy. The teachers were the enemy" (53).