PRODUCTION v. CONSUMPTION

“ But paranoia performs an important social function: it’s one way of ordering a disorderly world. Particularly a world in which the problems we face, from climate change to financial collapse to nuclear terrorism, are of a newly existential order, and our options for action are cosmically ineffectual. Through the paranoid worldview—through the belief in dark and interconnected and all-powerful conspiracies, terrestrial or otherwise—one may impose structure in a time of randomness, perceive meaning in a culture stripped of its religious moorings, imagine a degree of volition in a threatening world that increasingly seems beyond our power to influence. Listen to Coast to Coast at night, and you’ll hear the sound of millions of people trying to come to terms with what Yeats called ‘the uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor.’ ”