When I talk to my friends about paranoia, the topics begin to blur together. The nuances and particularities of certain delusions come up just as often as the justified fear of mass surveillance carried out by neofascist states with access to untold power over our epistemologies, both inter- and intra- personal. The reliability of our institutions to accurately describe reality [has been questionable for a long time](link to seeing like a state), but the sundering of the consensus reality they create has thrown many into a trustless environment, adrift on the unsea.
I've seen common advice about this fail to land. 'Model your enemy' and 'check the sources' don't really hold sway over the constant, itching feeling that this, too, could be a lie. The world, regardless of its actual tractability, feels as though it is dissolving under your feet. If the powers that be cannot grasp at the truth of a situation, or perhaps have a vested interest in making sure you cannot, what chance do you have at understanding? Welcome to Naraka, we hope you hate your stay.
One. You give up on trust. The only thing that you can possibly rely on is yourself, all else is suspect. Potentially enemies first, irrelevant otherwise. Or, maybe you give up on trust by abandoning it for blindness. You commit to go down with the ship, to die like a dog, no matter what. Your trust is broken, and so is your integrity, but your loyalty remains intact.
How do you know what to trust, or who? What can you trust beyond the information of your own senses, your own feelings? What even is this thing we call trust?
Trust, paranoia, and psychosis are intertwined pretty inextricably as concepts. Psychosis is the false _could;_ paranoia is the false _would;_ trust is the choice to reject _would_ in favour of belief in safety. When someone breaks your trust, they do that by proving the _would_ of paranoia true--the vulnerability in trust is to those who would, actually, really do what that little voice of fear says they're going to.
Zero-trust environments have their place, but to interact as though everything deserves zero trust is how you lock yourself out of meaningful coordination. Total-trust environments have their place, but to interact as though everything deserves total trust is how you get yourself put in one Forever Box or another, in this political climate pervaded by bad actors. There is a balance to be struck.
The first rule of security is, always, Shut The Fuck Up. By posting less, keeping secrets, not talking constantly about what you're doing and where you're going, and the like, you deny data to bad actors. If your _default_ is to deny data, you can _choose_ to give data to specific parties in trust, but if your default is to give data, you don't know where all of that ends up. By Shutting The Fuck Up and closing vectors of vulnerability, you create an environment where you have evidence towards trust; if you haven't given data that's said you've \<done something>, nobody would hurt you for it, because nobody could know to.
This leads into a whole thing on verifiable distrust. Yes, Big Brother is watching; we know governments collect ludicrous amounts of data on private individuals, this has been exposed to the public. However, in almost every case, you cannot verify that they have any reason to be paying attention to _you, specifically._
When knowing what distrusts you have that aren't verifiable doesn't do enough, that's where building a trustnet comes in. By choosing friends you can rely on, that you can _prechoose_ to trust, you build a system that lets you check the labels on your jar when your marbles have escaped and you're trying to figure out where they might have went. This relies on threat modeling as a skill; knowing how someone could hurt you and knowing them well enough to know whether or not they would. My coauthors could hurt me in quite a few ways; I know them well enough that I can say beyond a shadow of a doubt that they never would.
I live in the same city as my former abuser. They know where I live and could show up at any time. Rationally, I know they would never do that, and even if they did, they would not try to hurt me, and even if they did, I'm capable of defending myself now. The paranoia was in thinking that they were going to show up at any moment and try to hurt me. This came from my trust breaking in them having changed for the better, and as such cascading down to breaking the trust of them having self-preservation enough not to show up and try to harm me.
I had the psychotic belief that there were bugs under my skin. This was a false prior, in this case specifically based off a piece of sensory input that I misinterpreted--I thought something _could_ be happening that couldn't. I wanted to ask for help, because I knew I was having a psychotic episode, but my psychosis told me that they _could_ kill me if I tried to get help, and so my paranoia told me they _would_. This was fucking insidious--I ended up trying to ask my trustnet for help, but wasn't able to do so productively, because they obviously couldn't read my mind.
This may be the good distinction between paranoia and psychosis: _would_ vs _could_
if I believe the government is watching me specifically, that is paranoia, because they would not watch me specifically (I have given them no reason to)
if I believe the government is putting chips in me to track my movements, that is psychosis and paranoia, because I have no real data pointing to this as a possibility and I have given them no reason to
if I believe the government is logging my movements, that is. well it's not paranoia or psychosis per se but it's missing the step there of They Do Not Have To If You Carry A Phone
the bugs being able to kill me was psychosis, kathryn being willing to show up and try to rape me was paranoia
I'm not really certain how best to like. get in the weeds with them. I always just kind of use "I'm having an episode, what I believe right now is fragile and probably off a false-prior", and scrampling into my nearest trustnet member's DMs or physical vicinity and falling over metal pipe style with a request for help. The less you actively engage with the psychosis/paranoia loop the less you feed it the more likely it is to starve.
I will note I do think it tends to be way easier to lever out of paranoia/psychosis loops the earlier you catch it. The Bugs got so bad because it went down like four or five layers from the raw sensory input.
