"There is still another psychological process that I have run across in my explorations of failure to actualize the self. This evasion of growth can also be set in motion by a fear of paranoia." -- Abraham Maslow THE FARTHER REACHES OF HUMAN NATURE (Penguin Books, 1971) "Paranoia is a state of heightened awareness. Most people are persecuted beyond their wildest delusions." - Claude Steiner The Radical Psychiatry Manifesto -------------------------------- That it must be a conscious strategy of the monopoly capitalists to infiltrate leftist movements for the purpose of dividing the radical bourgeois and the proletariat seems obvious in view of the history of communist cultural disputes. Movements don't commit suicide of their own unassisted volition. It is always among radicals of the left--and to a lesser extent, the unestablished libertarian right--that silly debates about personal esthetic and sexual options upsurp meetings, stymie projects and divide movements. Republicans, who present no threat to the status quo, are capable of keeping cultural differences in a sane perspective. With rare exceptions like the arguing about abortion at Miami in 1972, so are Democrats. Leftists and Libertarians are just as intelligent, yet... Evidence of a conspiracy forever sharpening its techniques is also to be noted in that newer movements-- such as radical feminism -- carry a divisive emphasis of traditional values in the name of progressive values to ever-more-absurd extremes. What are we to conclude if not the more recently organized the movement the more sophisticated its infiltrators at getting in on the ground floor? In other words, just as revolutionaries evaluate the results of a battle and endeavor to avoid past errors, so do the capitalists. They refine their tactics just as we improve our own -- by applying the scientific method. Things appear to have advanced this far in the direction of preventing genuinely liberative revolution: all or most bourgeois radicals are captives of ruling class secret societies, kept in line by the threat of an ever more culturally retarded proletariat -- infiltrated with all manner of religious and reactionary agents -- culminating in a Prussian system of blackmail. So the brain of radicalism has been severed from the body. The educated and the strony are killing one another -- about culture. BULLETIN #9 1986 HO CHI ZEN