Thread by @DDDrewDaniel

My theory: As with inflated fears of car jacking & home invasion, most suburban paranoia scenarios are actually fantasies ("the bad other wants what I have"). Once stripped of defensive distortions, this fantasy looks to me like narcissism: "I am desired / we are desirable."

https://twitter.com/LauraRbnsn/status/1680192427569577985

everyone- I mean everyone- wants to feel that their life could be envied by some imaginary onlooker; our self-worth is rooted in this interpersonal network. The fantasy of "the person who wants what I have" is fundamentally pleasurable- it says "I'm worth something" to someone.

Everyday life under capitalism = there's always someone wealthier than you. Everyday life online = there's always someone more desirable than you.
So the value of the self is always under pressure.
It costs/hurts to know one is always "below", so...

The supposedly threatening, horrible "worst case scenarios" in which a home is invaded, a car is jacked, or children are abducted- they're all ways of stabilizing the idea that "i have what others want". Above all, the current paranoia of our culture is rooted in basic insecurity

This political rhetoric is rigged to turn deep feelings of parental care & love into a kind of perverse pride in paranoia itself: "Look how much I love my children! I'm willing to do insane things to limit everyone else's life because maybe someone somewhere is a threat!"

you to don't have to be Lee Edelman to see that the trump card in all this is the rhetorical figure of "the child" itself; once invoked, there's no limit to the extent of what can be justified (just think of every cliché schlocky film and TV narrative about a vigilante parent)

anyway this @mxwfx piece on the traffic in children narrative is worth reading if you want a critical analysis: parapraxismagazine.com/articles/the-t…

@mxwfx and as a followup this more recent piece on the concept of the child as "property" of the parent also by @mxwfx is useful too I think in flagging why the parent's ego is at stake in the fantasy of trafficking / abduction : lux-magazine.com/article/free-t…

@mxwfx some might say "this is too elaborate! parents love their children & want to protect them from people hurting them, it's not that deep" etc. I understand that the allegation that this is fundamentally narcissism might be a tough sell or too simple, so... let's talk about "love"

@mxwfx obvious Freudian point here, but: every powerful bond is the site of psychic ambivalence- from the infant at the breast upwards, the place of intense love and attachment and pleasure is always already also a site of aggression, anger, even hatred and fantasies of destruction.

@mxwfx parents do love their children, and the fantasy of sacrificing themselves for the sake of their children's flourishing is deeply pleasurable- and not so secretly narcissistic to boot- they become admirable in their own minds because of their capacity to put their children first.

@mxwfx but there's got to be a psychic reserve of resentment, dislike, disappointment, and unhappiness too. IMO most of us long sometimes to be rid of the very people we love because the sheer burden of being needy & attached that powerfully is itself exhausting, unbearable, too much.

@mxwfx But those emotions are felt to be unspeakable, & they get buried, repressed, disavowed. So the fantasy of the bad person "out there" who wants to hurt the child is culturally useful as a kind of displacement or scapegoat, boogeyman as strategic placeholder for such feelings.

@mxwfx Obviously, real abuse really happens and there are laws against it and protocols in place in spaces where children are vulnerable. Every teacher and nurse has to think this through. What I am talking about is the affective excess of moral panics and paranoias that circulate now.

@mxwfx Those cultural scripts are not really about protecting vulnerable children but about creating a thrilling vicarious feeling of moral rectitude (stance-taking) for consumers of media that turns on-- and exploits-- such scenarios for $$ at the box office and/or power in office.

@ThinkinParke here’s another example of how omnipresent this fantasy scenario is- probably because it relieves people of the tedious predictability and drudgery of everyday parenting as care work etc

@mxwfx whoah this thread blew up! hello new followers! I mostly tweet about early modern literature, electronic music, and random wanderings with my husband. Welcome! While I'm rambling I wanna clear up and reinforce a few points from that already maybe too long thread, so here goes:

@mxwfx There's an obv distinction between sensible precaution about crime & what I was describing as "paranoid scenarios." Bad stuff happens. I've been robbed at gunpoint. I was home once & people broke into my house (I yelled and they fled). So: I know that "crime is real." But . . .

@mxwfx What I am talking about is "paranoid fantasy" that erupts into everyday life as behavior without much evidence or basis to support it. Here's an example of this: A friend is in an art museum in San Francisco, sees a large painting on the opposite wall, and takes a photograph.

@mxwfx Out of nowhere, someone yells "EXCUSE ME! WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING?" My friend freezes cuz he thinks oh this must be a guard, maybe there's a no-photography policy or something. But he turns around & there is an enraged suburban looking lady.
She is pushing a baby stroller.

@mxwfx Guards swoop in, try to figure out what is going on, and out comes a wild story. She has decided that my friend must be a pedophile who is photographing her child because he is collecting images, and demands that he erase photographs from his phone in front of her, right now.

@mxwfx He's baffled, & then angry, because of the sheer absurdity of the charge. Now, yes, people do sometimes take "creep shots", especially of young women on the subway. It's not impossible, but in this context (someone in a museum takes a picture), think about what is most plausible:

@mxwfx A) someone took a picture because they wanted a picture of a painting because duh you're in a museum

B) someone took a picture of your baby because they want to masturbate to it later on

I hope the choice here should be obvious.

@mxwfx So the decision in an instant to accuse a perfect stranger of a thrillingly lurid, intensely perverse, and statistically unlikely form of behavior in public, and then to create a dramatic scene starring one's self about it, is, to me, evidence of a paranoid fantasy in flower.

@mxwfx and the reason I connect that fantasy to "narcissism" (admittedly, perhaps a stretch) is that it rests upon the idea that "MY baby is so important, so precious, so fragile, so charged with significance that everything anyone does in a room with this baby must be about this baby"