Never going to NOT upvote this. Essential read on the US.

Thanks for sharing this paper

The most interesting part of this article is there doesn't seem to be any strong evidence that the paranoid people were wrong. Europe has spent most of the last 200 years under the control of a relatively small number of families and it is just common sense that there would be conspiracies to seize control of the US government and change its ideology. People debate which of them should gain the ascendancy every election.

> John Robison ... saw [the Masons] as a libertine, anti-Christian movement, given to the corruption of women, the cultivation of sensual pleasures, and the violation of property rights...

That is a pretty accurate description of where Europe ended up in the 1900s to today, so it seems a unreasonable to dismiss the man out of hand. 100 years for a big social project isn't that long a time given how slowly the world moved back then. It is reasonable to say that the Masons might have been a benign organisation - but they also might not have been. There is no contest that groups in Europe were trying and succeeding to push in that direction. The communists had their big breakout in the 1900s but the personality type always has and will exist and the intellectual groundwork was being laid at least as early as the 1850s.

There is this weird social dynamic where people dismiss the idea that radical change is possible in foresight then shrug it off and basically don't care in hindsight. It results in remarkably small groups being able to achieve some incredible things, but it is a bit frustrating an attitude to argue with.

There's research pointing out "the paranoid style" is everywhere in the world, just controlled or checked to various extents in different places and different times. Still a good read for perspective.

I first read this after hearing the band, The Paranoid Style.

Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't after you.

The list of paranoid organizations suffers from survivorship bias - every "paranoid" John Birch Society has a Ukrainian Insurgent Army or Blue Shirts Society counterpart. In fact, given the populations of the USSR and China, one is more likely to find oneself in the latter sort of organization than the former.

The other problem is special pleading - the author adds more and more conditions on what constitutes the "paranoid style", until he's able to isolate the phenomenon to mostly the right half of the political spectrum. Meanwhile one can make a career of blaming everything on capitalism, colonialism, racism, or whiteness [1], and remain safely in the clear.

[1] And many have, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noel_Ignatiev or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Sontag, employed by the very education system the author claims it is paranoid to believe contains traitors - sorry, not "contains traitors", the author deftly hedges it as requiring "the whole apparatus" to have fallen into enemy hands. An unusually strong condition, given it is applied to something so vague as a "style". I'd call it a strawman, if it wasn't written by such an eminent author.