Manichaean paranoia

Manichaean paranoia is a concept used by some political thinkers to describe the political-religious worldview of some political actors who view the world in stark terms of black or white, enemy or friend. It combines correlations with the dualistic cosmology of the ancient Persian Gnostic religion Manichaeism, which viewed the world as place of ongoing historical struggle between forces of an immaterial good realm of light and a material evil realm of darkness, with paranoia concerning actors supposedly aligned with evil who are actively seeking to harm actors aligned with good. Because of the intense dualism, intense moral polarization typically results, and political positions taken by one exhibiting Manichaean paranoia take on either a distinctly morally good or morally evil cast, with very little if any ground left for ambiguity.

Actors who function within Manichaean paranoia operate within an alarming dilemma in the belief that they must either proactively fight against evil actors or be destroyed by them; and since nothing is more key in Manichaeanism than defeating evil, actors who function under it can justify actions considered evil within Western worldviews, so long as they believe good will result, i.e., "the ends justify the means".

Probably no political actor who displays Manichaean paranoia does so out of conscious adherence to Manichaeanism, although similar worldviews have correlates, such as the Christian and Islamic doctrines indicating that all actions in the world are ultimately manifestations between a cosmological battle between God and Satan. Rather, even as the worldview of Manichaean paranoia is conveyed through political rhetoric, so is the phrase and its meanings rhetorical.

Although earlier political thinkers described Manichaean paranoia, it was probably the modern American political thinker Zbigniew Brzezinski who first coined the term in the early 1990s. His goal was to describe the worldview undergirding U.S. President George W. Bush, including his construction of nations as either "with us or against us" in the "War on terror". Manichaean paranoia has since pased into increasingly frequent parlance.

Further reading

• "Manichaeism in American Politics" by William F. May
• Hofstadter, Richard. 2008. The Paranoid Style in American Politics. Vintage, ISBN 0307388441.

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This article is based upon the article "Manichaean Paranoia" by Stephen Ewen, available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Attribution on face of article is required.