
“These are the Armies of The Night. They are 60,000 strong. They outnumber the cops five to one. They could run New York City.”
If you’ve ever been unfortunate enough to have an insane person in your life, then you know the red flags that indicate you’re in the presence of a troubled mind. I’m not talking charming eccentricity or uneasy mercurialness. I mean batshittery.
Conspiracy-related paranoia is key for the unstable. There’s always some form of shadow government or encroaching social malaise that only they and the like-minded can see coming. A wildly inflated sense of self-importance is also integral; something about them makes them so special that powerful forces are uniting to destroy or discredit them. Secret societies — the Illuminati, Satanists, Communists, and aliens (the illegal kind and the invading variety) — are typical oppressor fixations.

Lately I’ve been positing that extreme racist and ethnist reactions may be a form of mental illness themselves. The causal and “enlightened” forms of prejudice — the kind you have to awkwardly dance around as you argue you can spot an undocumented worker by the type of footwear they sport — are character flaws, but the sort of convulsive, visceral kind that revolves around the idea that our arch nemeses Hawaii and Kenya would collude to put a Manchurian Candidate in the White House is a whole different bag. (read the full article)






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