caryoscelus:~#

Why I feel paranoia? It’s pretty simple: I know that my existence and behaviour is making some people very uncomfortable. If they had their say in it, a lot of them would erase me for sure without so much as second thought (*). The reason they still haven’t? It has more to do with both amount of my importance to them and amount of resources they have at their disposal.

First, they don’t see enough of me to become obsessed with my extermination — they express their discomfort via social pressure and occasional acts of violence. They don’t feel as though I’m a huge threat so taking drastic actions seems unwarranted (for those who even have a capacity to assess situation logically).

And on the other hand even if it’s perfectly plausible for them to build a conspiracy against me, they are just not as smart individually to pull it off effortlessly. Because of the first reason most of them don’t even start to bother mounting any kind of effort against me. And those few who do tend to actually go through with it — they are either smart enough to realize it isn’t worth the benefits; or they are dumb enough to spend time obsessing over fantasies that don’t form a coherent plan.

What makes me afraid then? First of all, their numbers. In current state of affairs there are simply more of them. Much more. Second of all, their potential for intellect. Having myself the capacity to enact a perfect plan against me makes me scared that they would be interested and capable of doing so.

Luckily, as I mentioned above, they tend to be inherently less capable: after all, my only sin is being different and if their intellect is weak enough to hate me for it, it’s also weak enough to be able to create or follow the plan. The problem is, however, that collective intelligence or collective physical strength are often enough to overcome the gap in individual intelligence. And gathering in collectives is what they do.

And right here we come to a sort of conclusion that perhaps may feel a little underwhelming to some of you: to combat your paranoia one of the best options is to build a community of likewise intelligent and kind individuals and make it strong enough to protect its members from the kinds of dangers you’re afraid of.

See you in the next post in the series, maybe.

(*): some of you may think that’s already paranoia, but keep reading