In The Zone –
April 17, 2020 – Both pronoia and paranoia create an exaggerated sense of coherence from the chaos and confusion of the social world.”— Professor Laurence J. Kirmayer. To personalize something is an inherent quality that we can’t refrain from doing; to create order from disorder and to instill meaning where we feel it ought to exist — these are pre-dispositions that are so ingrained within our genetic impulses that we can’t even fathom not having them by our side because they make sense out of a nonsensical reality. In doing so, we’ve come to classify different forms of perception — we distinguish optimists from pessimists; we differentiate faith from hope, skeptics from cynics, spirituality from mysticism. While it’s all done under the bifurcating veins of our knowledge structures, we can’t help but contextualize, collectively as much as individually. So when something happens to us, any external event, some of us have a tendency to group it in as, maybe, something good that we had coming to us or something bad that usually happens around this time; maybe something we had been due to experience or something part of a greater scheme.
