We sold our flock. We moved from the farm to be closer to our grandchildren. The world is rising to meet me in other very different ways than when I lived on our farm. One consideration for me now is through a longer lens: how is the world being moved for my children and grandchildren. I feel I owe a duty of care not only to mine, but to all of the adjacently vulnerable: all children, all families, all who are being punched down upon.
I have been thinking about how my own attitudes need to change to reflect this duty. For example, I have been re-considering my own paranoia about the shape of the body politic. As perhaps you are. There are many ways that I feel the world is “out to get me”.
In many ways our country was founded on paranoia–our shortcomings, our greed, our lust for power. Yet…it is also built on another less-named concept–pronoia, the opposite of paranoia. Instead of the world being “out to get us” perhaps it is organized to support us. What is the Declaration of Independence if not an avowal of the human spirit
I realize that this is not standard operating thought especially in this perilous time. I can only draw from my experience of pronoia. In this three score and ten that I call my life so far, the world has seemed to constrain, to “iris-down” into a sad snapshot that I have always been able to beat back barely. This continuing doomscrolling death spiral has led me to naturally conclude at times that “Just Because You’re Paranoid Doesn’t Mean They’re Not Out to Get You”.
The truth does not come easily to me. I often have to ante up with positive energy and a hope-filled accounting of aspiration and idealism before the paranoia fades. I know that the world can be a pestilence, but for this attitude of pronoia to work it must be worked at and with. And when I did the work, then all manner of powerful change resulted. If you are willing to prime the pump, the whole world does appear to NOT be gunning for you. I think it has your back.
I am always collecting pronoia. Here are a couple of YouTube vids that might be evidence.
The first video is from Captain Kleemer, a DIY influencer with almost 100k subscribers and over 20k viewers for this particular vid.in this episode his content is about fixing a tractor for use in his earthmoving business.
There is not a single business more confounding than that of restoring old equipment to money-making working order. Old equipment tends to be reliably unreliable and truly “out to get you.”
Kleemer has a powerfully witty and pronoiac vision of this unreliable work. At 27:21 in the video Kleemer, after an unexpected detour to fix a dozen twisted off rusty bolt heads he drops a piece of metal that he is trying to fit onto the tractor frame for welding.Before the metal hits the ground he notes, deadpan pun intended, “Gravity check.” This is his way viewing the world at large as helpful. It is not out to get him by making his work hard. Rather it is out to help him by letting him know that gravity still works. Or as the Greeks might say: paranoia to pronoia to metanoia.
The second video is a rant from former u.N. nuclear weapons inspector, Scott Ritter, titled “Pay It Forward”. I think of it as the Biblical injunction to cast your manna on the water (Ecclesiastes 11:1). Ritter recounts a story of how he helped a fellow Marine get help for his stuck car. Ritter then retold how he got the same kind of help in the recent East Coast snowpocalypse. He felt the world circling back to help him when he got his car stuck in a snow drift. Buried head first in the snow and trying to dig out, he felt the tug of a hand on his foot. A voice called out telling him, “We got you man. Don’t worry.”
Or just call up The Big Guy:
