Paranoia

"It's not paranoid, if it's true".
"Maybe the paranoids were right." Freud on escaping Nazi Germany.
My favourite psychiatry joke: "What's the opposite of being paranoid?  Thinking you're following someone."
Jesus said "Do not be afraid."  It was a command.  Anxiety is a measure of our distance from God.  Worrying is wicked.  Kierkegard said that Life is 'Suffering unto Death".
Existential angst is that sense of being separate and apart or alone.
To be a lone and at peace is like resting in the hands of God. It's a childlike experience in which we early know mostly being held and fed and we haven't learned the 'hard knocks' of life by being betrayed, dropped, gone hungry, lied to, hurt, deliberately or accidentally.
If one is hurt enough it's possible to become afraid of much more than the original hurters.  The feeling gets 'generalized'.  One person hurts you enough and all people can be potentially a source of anxiety.
Often the person on the street is trying to stay away from you and as part of his extreme isolation he uses filth and smell as a distancing maneuver.
Lots of other people smile and say everything is okay because there's no one they trust to know their secrets. We are as sick as our secrets.
Discrimination is a product of fear.  Antidiscrimination legislation can be healing or more frightening.
There's still the Big Man and his Big Woman and they still are the ones who write history.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil because I 'm the meanest biggest one in the valley".
There is safety in numbers. Gangs begat armies begat nations.
Tribalism is a form of institutionalized paranoia.
First strike policy is kill it before it kills you.
Yet the Golden Rule professed by all the greatest civilizations of the world is simply, do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
Courage isn't fearlessness but rather doing the right thing in spite of fear.
Paranoia can be explained by 'projection'.  I want to hurt others so I see others as ready to hurt me.  It's said that addressing paranoia is an 'inside job'. Spirituality is 'growing love inside'.
Paranoia and Love can not coexist.  The depth of love we can know is limitted by the amount of the interior garden we give up to the weeds of fear.  There's only so much soil.
That which grows is that which you have watered with attention and thought.
Love