Free Complaint: From Minor Moans to Principled Protests by Julian Baggini Page B

laziness, our longing for the simple black and white in a world of bewildering grey.
Paranoid complaints
     
    There is an old wisecrack that goes, ‘Just because you’re paranoid, that doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.’ Like many of the best jokes, however, it has an element of truth, and not just in the obvious point that not everyone who feels persecuted is imagining it. More interestingly, most instances of what we might call non-clinical paranoia build on a vast mass of truth.
     
    Non-clinical paranoia is not a mental illness, though the obsession it often fosters can eventually lead people to the sanatorium. It is, rather, a cooler version of the false belief that there are unrecognised or unacknowledged forces operating against the individual or society. In contrast to the clinical paranoiac, who simply imagines things that are not there, the non-clinical variant makes understandable errors of reasoning.
    The world is full of non-clinical paranoiacs, who can be identified by their tendency to make what could be calledsecond-order complaints. At the first level there is the basic complaint (9/11 was a CIA plot, the BBC is run by leftists, Jews fix US foreign policy etc.); but then at the second level is the complaint shared by all of them: that this terrible truth is being somehow suppressed. To put it in the formulation I have used to define complaint, not enough people know that things are not as they ought to be, because things are not as they ought to be at the level of knowledge transfer either.
    Such thinking can be seen as paranoid because of how these two levels of complaint fit together. In order to believe both that things are wrong and that this fact is not acknowledged as the simple truth that it is, it becomes necessary to ascribe to people who have an interest in suppressing the fact incredible powers of knowledge management. For if this weren’t the case, why on earth wouldn’t more people see the truth for what it is? Hence the postulating of the suppressing, powerful agent behind the scenes becomes essential to maintain the coherence of holding a truth that so few are willing to accept.
    Non-clinical paranoia is widespread because it is so hard to hit the ‘Aristotelian’ mean when it comes to credulity. Aristotle persuasively argued that right ways of thinking and conduct tended to fall between two extremes. Courage, for example, lies between the excess of rashness and the deficiency of cowardice. Generosity avoids the excess of profligacy and also the deficiency of meanness.
    We don’t always have words to describe the mean or its two errant neighbours. Complaint is a good example. A person who complains too much is a moaning minnie or a whinging fool; a person who doesn’t complain enough is a doormat or a pushover. But we lack a word or phrase for the person who complains just enough and in the right way. I might suggest we refer to such a person as a quintessentially Aristoteliancomplainant, but for the fact that it is a horrible mouthful and the obvious acronym would make such a person a ‘quac’.
    Credulity is another axis of virtue which lacks a suitable word for the mean. Those who accept what they are told too readily are called credulous or gullible; those who go to the other extreme are over-suspicious, cynical or non-clinically paranoid. Those in the middle can be described as persons who proportion belief to evidence and argument in the appropriate way – which, again, is hardly a phrase that’s usable in everyday speech.
    As is so often the case, these two vices are not accorded the same degree of seriousness, and how they are viewed varies tremendously according to what social circles you move in. In many intellectual circles, for instance, it is de rigueur to be utterly sceptical about everything that Western politicians do. This is particularly true of people who adhere to what might be called Cod Chomskyism, or its British counterpart, Knee-jerk Pilgerism.