NORMALLY, the closer one lives to New York City, the more unbalanced one is. But with the nation so steeped in germaphobia that we are all living in a public psychiatric ward, this everyday, occasionally endearing neuroticism in the modern capital of psychoanalysis is culminating in high levels of mass paranoia. Any self-respecting psychiatrist should be walking the streets of Manhattan taking notes.

Heather Mac Donald writes at Unz Review on “The paranoid style in Covid America:”

“To grasp the urgency of lifting the ubiquitous economic shutdowns, visit New York City’s Central Park, ideally in the morning. At 5:45 am, it is occupied by maybe 100 runners and cyclists, spread over 843 acres. A large portion of these early-bird exercisers wear masks. Are they trying to protect anyone they might encounter from their own unsuspected coronavirus infection? Perhaps. But if you yourself run towards an oncoming runner on a vector that will keep you at least three yards away when you pass each other, he is likely to lunge sideways in terror if your face is not covered. The masked cyclists, who speed around the park’s inner road, apparently think that there are enough virus particles suspended in the billions of square feet of fresh air circulating across the park to enter their mucous membranes and to sicken them.

These are delusional beliefs, yet they demonstrate the degree of paranoia that has infected the population. Every day the lockdown continues, its implicit message that we are all going to die if we engage in normal life is reinforced. Polls show an increasing number of Americans opting to continue the economic quarantine indefinitely lest they be ‘unsafe’. The longer that belief is reinforced, the less likely it will be that consumers will patronize reopened restaurants or board airplanes in sufficient numbers to bring the economy back to life. . . . “

There’s a bright side to this.

The more you live amid this hysterical fear of death, the happier you can be that you are mortal and will live this life, in this world, only once.

Please follow and like us: