The self-cure for insignificance is paranoia

As the excellent Adam Philips point out the  self-cure for insignificance is paranoia. Paranoid Modernists, let's call them Democrats or Liberals or Progressives are marked, above all, by a sense of what is unbearable about modern life and much of the writing of the period has a manifesto-like quality, and the manifesto – the address to the enemy – (Populism, Brexit, Trump) is the paranoid genre par excellence.

It is evident in their endless protesting  in which they smuggle back the sacred in the guise of the secular

The idea of something beyond our control, the good, morals,  intervening in our lives in a way that ineluctably changes them persists even if masked by those oh so forward looking avant gardists who will resort to anything even the metaphscial

So a career path for these bien pensants Democrats or Liberals or Progressives is to eliminate the muddle they find themselvs in ...by identifying the enemy.

The modern paranoiac has realised that since God is dead someone has got to be god: someone has to know what is going on.

Paranoia is a solvent for messiness and confusion; a hotbed of convictions.

Paranoia was the self-cure for those who couldn’t take it, for all those modern and Modernist writers with substance anxiety. One is in a paranoid state of mind when one’s insignificance is unthinkable

The paranoiac, it turns out, is at the centre of a world that has no centre. The history that Trotter tells suggests first that the so-called crisis of modernity was a legitimation crisis, with writers merely the most articulate complainers about the fact that everyone was (and is) now marginal because in a secular world nature is all margin and no text; and second that hierarchy within the human world was increasingly determined by a new, secular magic. With the gradual redistribution of wealth went a redistribution of magic. ‘During the 19th century,’ Trotter writes,

the status the upwardly mobile professional classes sought for their expertise was the status of a magical power: a status previously or otherwise afforded to qualities such as wealth or warlike valour . . . Sometimes, when they did not find it, they made it up. Paranoia is a delusion of magical power . . . Paranoia, the psychiatrists maintained, was the professional person’s madness of choice.

Paranoia, one might say, is the ambition to go on believing in ambition.