In honor of Paul Watzlawick and for your amusement, edification, or both, I thought I would repost the following in full as it’s an interesting little snip from my favorite author Bob Wilson whom also recently passed away.
SUSPICION LEADS TO MORE SUSPICION

In brief, once a government has n orders of secret police spying on each other, all are potentially suspect, and to be safe, a secret police of order n plus 1 must be created. And so on, forever.
Thus games without end
Thus, the USSR after 62 years of Marxist secret police games reached the point where the alpha males were terrified of painters and poets.
In spying-and-hiding transactions, worry leads to more worry and suspicion leads to more suspicion. The very act of participating, however unwillingly, in the secret police game-even as victim, or citizen being monitored-will eventually produce all the classic symptoms of clinical paranoia.
The government, on discovering that growing numbers of citizens regard it with fear and loathing, will increase the size and powers of the secret police, to protect itself. The infinite regress again appears.
The only alternative was suggested sarcastically by playwright Bertolt Brecht (who was hounded by U.S. secret police as a communist and by East German secret police, later, as not sufficiently communist). “If the government doesn’t trust the people,” Brecht asked innocently, “why doesn’t it dissolve them and elect a new people?” No way has yet been invented to elect a new people, so the government will instead spy on the existing
people with increased vigor.
Every secret police organization is engaged in both the collection
of information and the production of misinformation, euphemistically called “disinformation.” That is, you score points in the secret police game both by hoarding signals (information units)-hiding facts from competitors-and by foisting false signals (fake information units) on the other players. This creates the situation I call Optimum SNAFU, in which every player has rational (not neurotic) reasons for suspecting that each and all may be trying to deceive him, gull him, con him, dupe him and generally misinform him. As Henry Kissinger is alleged to have said, anybody in Washington who isn’t paranoid must be crazy.
Such is the neuro-sociological “logic” of a Disinformation Matrix. It is, as Paul Watzlawik has demonstrated, the logic of schizophrenia.
This leads to an equal and opposite burden of omniscience upon those at the top, in the eye of the pyramid. All that is forbidden to those at the bottom-the conscious activities of perception and evaluation-is demanded of the Power Elite, the master class. They must attempt to do the seeing, hearing, smelling, etc. and all the thinking and evaluating for the whole pyramid.
But a man with a gun (the power to punish) is told only what the target thinks will not cause him to pull the trigger (write the pink slip, order the court-martial). The elite, with their burden of omniscience, face the underlings, with their burden of nescience, and receive only the feedback consistent with their own preconceived notions and reality-tunnels. The burden of omniscience becomes, over time, another and more complex burden of nescience. Nobody really knows anything anymore, or if they do, they are careful to hide the fact. The burden of nescience becomes omnipresent. More and more of sensory experience becomes unspeakable.
As Paul Watzlawick notes, that which is objectively repressed (unspeakable) soon becomes subjectively repressed (unthinkable).
Nobody likes to feel like a coward and a liar constantly. It is easier to cease to notice where the official tunnel-reality differs from existential fact. Thus SNAFU accelerates and rigiditus bureaucraticus sets in-the last stage before all brain activity
ceases and the pyramid is clinically dead as an intellectual entity.
We also propose that “national security” is another semantic
spook, an Empedoclean knot; that the search for national security
Prometheus Rising 243
is the chief cause of national insecurity and a potent anti-intelligence
mechanism.
As Leary writes:
Secrecy is the original sin. Fig leaf in the Garden of Eden. The
basic crime against love… The purpose of life is to receive,
synthesize and transmit energy. Communication fusion is the
goal of life. Any star can tell you that. Communication is love.
Secrecy, withholding the signal, hoarding, hiding, covering up
the light is motivated by shame and fear.
As so often happens, the right wing is half right for the
wrong reasons. They say primly: if you have done nothing
wrong, you have no fear of being bugged. Exactly. But the logic goes both ways. Then FBI files, CIA dossiers, White House conversations should be open to all. Let everything hang open. Let government be totally visible. The last, the very last people to hide their actions should be the police and the government.
What my eminent colleague states so poetically can be stated
more functionally as follows:
Every secret police agency must be monitored by an elite
corps or secret-police-of-the-second-order. This is because (a) infiltration of the secret police, for purposes of subversion, will always be a prime goal of both internal subversives and hostile foreign powers and (b) secret police agencies acquire fantastic capacities to blackmail and intimidate others, in and out of government. Stalin executed three chiefs of the secret police in a row because of this danger. As Nixon so wistfully said in a Watergate transcript, Well, Hoover performed. He would have fought. That was the point. He would have defied a few people. He would have scared them to death. He had a file on everybody. [Italics added.]
Thus, those who employ secret police agencies must monitor them, to be sure they are not acquiring too much power.
Here a sinister infinite regress enters the game. Any elite second order police must be, also, subject to infiltration, or to acquiring “too much power” in the opinion of its masters. And so
it, too, must be monitored, by a secret-police-of-the-third-order.
In brief, once a government has n orders of secret police spying on each other, all are potentially suspect, and to be safe, a
secret police of order n plus 1 must be created. And so on,
forever.
In practice, of course, this cannot regress to mathematical infinity, but only to the point where every citizen is spying on every other citizen or until the funding runs out.
National Security, in practice, must always fall short of the logically Empedoclean infinite regress it requires for perfect “security.” In that gap between the ideal of “One Nation under surveillance with wire taps and urine tests for all,” and the strictly limited real situation of finite resources and finite funding, there is ample encouragement for paranoias of all sorts to flourish, both among the citizens and among the police.
THE BURDEN OF OMNISCIENCE
or: Why you can’t reach the Court
or the Castle in Kafka’s allegories
Thus, the USSR after 62 years of Marxist secret police games reached the point where the alpha males were terrified of painters
and poets.
In spying-and-hiding transactions, worry leads to more worry and suspicion leads to more suspicion. The very act of participating, however unwillingly, in the secret police game-even as victim, or citizen being monitored-will eventually produce all the classic symptoms of clinical paranoia.
The agent knows who he is spying on, hut he never knows who is spying on him. Could it be his wife, his mistress, his secretary,
the newsboy, the Good Humor man?
If there is a secret police at all, in any nation, every branch and department of government, and institutions which are not even admitted to be parts of government, becomes suspect in the eves of cautious and intelligent people as a possible front for, or tunnel to, the secret police. That is, the more shrewd will recognize that something bearing the label of HEW or even International Silicon and Pencil might actually be the CIA or NSA in disguise. In such a deception network, conspiracy theories proliferate.
Rumor is necessary, it has been found, when people cannot find “official” news sources that can be trusted to tell them what is really going on. The present author, having worked in the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement, the legalize-pot movement and other dissident causes, has repeatedly been approached by friend A with dire warnings that friend B is almost certainly a secret police agent, only to be told later and independently by friend C that friend A is a secret police agent.
It requires delicate neurological know-how to keep one’s sense
of humor in the secret police matrix.
The more omnipresent the secret police, the more likely it is that intelligent men and women will regard the government with fear and loathing.
The government, on discovering that growing numbers of citizens regard it with fear and loathing, will increase the size and powers of the secret police, to protect itself.
The infinite regress again appears.

From Prometheus Rising, by Robert Anton Wilson
Welcome to schizophrenia Nation…
Note: sorry about the formatting, I’m just to tired at the moment to clean it up.

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Apr 4 2007 1:41 utc | 3

Wow, long post Uncle!
Of course that is correct what Robert Anton W says, paranoia breeds itself — Kissinger’s “anyone in Washington who isn’t paranoid must be crazy” quote might as well be true.
Along with a recent appreciation for economics, the whole idea of communications, cybernetic theory and so on is my fascination. Thanks for this thread Bernhard.

Posted by: jonku | Apr 4 2007 9:29 utc | 5