The Paranoia Switch
1 rating since posting on Monday, November 19, 2007
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Most famous for her 2005 book, The Sociopath Next Door, Dr Martha Stout's 2007 book, The Paranoia Switch, discusses how fear changes the way we think and how others can manipulate that change for their own convenience. Using large-scale examples such as McCarthyism and more intimate examples such as domestic abuse, she discusses how the structure of our brains (and particularly the limbic system) can be used to manipulate us. When practiced on the scale of the Salem witch trials or by groups such as the Ku Klux Klan, she calls such attacks "limbic wars" and identifies six clear stages from their inception to forgotten obscurity. Preceded by a group trauma which is then re-enacted by "protectors" for their own advantage, she also identifies key characteristics of such obvious fear brokers. Noting ways in which people seem to be genetically predisposed to authoritarian or contextual understanding, she identifies ten key characteristics of fear brokers such as an aura of infallibility, constant stress of danger, secretiveness, a disrespect for facts, a tend to ridicule their opponents and a tendency to behave like archetypal parents, constantly looking good and shaming people over sex. Using her final chapter to analyze the obvious example of how the "Global War on Terror" is a clear example of a limbic war, Stout follows how rhetoric leads government "protectors" down the clear path to condoning constant fear and torture, with some final encouragement as to how the individual can resist vulnerability to such tactics in political as well as personal life. A very useful book that clearly demonstrates the feminist assertion that "the personal is political" in a practical way for our times. - Mac Rory , posted 11/19/07 |
The Paranoia Switch was recommended for:
- Tribe: Reed College's gateway tribe
- Tribe: Way of the Superior Man
- Tribe: Ask a Sexy Woman Anything
- Tribe: DemocracyNow!
- Tribe: Masculinities
