Today it happened to me again. I perceived seeing several inconsistencies and got suspicious. In case of an incoming message from Amina, a 26 year blonde female from Accra, Singapore, showing a touristic profile picture from Paris, most people would get suspicious. My suspicion in another case is much more difficult to explain and too personal/private for this blog.
Daniel Freeman, a consultant clinical psychologist, has written a book, Paranoia: The 21st-Century Fear, with his brother Jason Freeman, a writer. Their thesis is that we are suffering from paranoia more than ever before. It was a mental disorder that was once thought to afflict 1% of the population – basically, people with schizophrenia – but now, according to studies, it affects 25% of us. Guardian
Over the last 15 years, as a research fellow for the Wellcome Trust, Freeman has found links between paranoia and urbanisation, globalisation, migration and wealth inequality, increased power of the media, CCTV cameras and the internet. Urbanisation particularly fascinates him. There are a number of really consistent results looking at the adult population in Sweden, showing people in urban areas have higher levels of paranoia. But we don’t know exactly why,” he says. Guardian
An environmental or social influence, however, is nothing without a psychological reaction. “This is another main reason why I believe paranoia is on the increase. Because we are constantly reminded, in the press, of threats from other people, we overestimate the chances of these events happening to us. There is a lot of research on this. It is what is known as the ‘availability heuristic’. We make an estimate of the likelihood of a particular event simply by how easily we bring it to mind. Our children are getting fat because we aren’t letting them out to play enough. We’re scared they will be run over or abducted by strangers. In fact, the risks to the health from obesity are much higher than the risks of either of those events.” Guardian
Paranoia rises in your teens and 20s, drops off and then kicks in again in old age, when debilitation and hearing issues have an effect. But there is a great reticence about it. “Go into a bookshop and there are loads of books on anxiety, on depression. [ ] Nothing on paranoia”. Guardian
The increase in urbanisation and the increase of paranoia indeed shows an interesting correlation. In my blog of 28 May 2015, I mentioned an FT article by Dutch American Ivo Daalder on the rise of global city states. According to his article “For the first time in human history, more people now live in cities than in rural areas. By 2050, 6.5bn people, two-thirds of all humanity, will live and work in cities. In 1950 fewer than one billion did so.”
Personally, I prefer the sounds of nature rather than city sounds. The abundance of artificial lights and unnatural electronic sounds easily become agitating. The waiting in continuous queues even makes things worse. Obviously, it doesn’t help that most people around you are strangers rather than familiar faces. Also see my 10 September 2015 blog on the human distrust towards strangers.
To me, urbanisation feels like creating ginormous battery cages similar to animals like chicken. Despite a maximum of 7 or 8 per battery cage, chicken still get stressed: they fight each other and lose health (e.g., feathers, infections, viral diseases). A next step towards paranoia amongst chicken doesn’t seem far fetched. It’s easy to see a parallel with human beings. Urbanisation is rather new to human social structures and to me it’s unclear whether the benefits (e.g., work/income) outweigh the cons (e.g., health, loneliness). To be continued in my next blog.
Elvis Presley (1935-1977) – Suspicious Minds (1969) – (artist, lyrics, Wiki)
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