Pronoia & other Wyrdness

Here are a few wyrd things to consider.

1) Aliens in MacBeth?

What are these

So wither’d and so wild in their attire,

That look not like the inhabitants o’ the earth,

And yet are on’t? Live you? or are you aught

That man may question?

–William Shakespeare

Taken out of context, it sounds as if Bill is writing about aliens instead of witches.

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2) What’s the opposite of paranoia?

It’s pronoia or having the sense that there is a conspiracy that exists to help the person. It is also used to describe a philosophy that the world is set up to secretly benefit people.

The writer and Electronic Frontier Foundation co-founder John Perry Barlow defined pronoia as “the suspicion the Universe is a conspiracy on your behalf”.^[1] The academic journal “Social Problems” published an article entitled “Pronoia” by Fred H. Goldner in 1982 (vol 30, pp. 82–91). It received a good deal of publicity at the time including references to it in Psychology Today, The New York Daily News, The Wall Street Journal etc. It described a phenomenon that was the opposite from paranoia and provided numerous examples of specific persons who displayed such characteristics.

It was subsequently picked up in England and written about as described below. Wired Magazine published an article in issue 2.05 (May 1994) titled “Zippie!”. The cover of the magazine featured a psychedelic image of a smiling young man with wild hair, a funny hat, and crazy eyeglasses. Written by Jules Marshall, the article announced an organized cultural response to Thatcherism in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. The opening paragraphs of the article describe “a new and contagious cultural virus” and refer to pronoia as “the sneaking feeling one has that others are conspiring behind your back to help you.” (Love that quote!)

3) Most of us here know that synchronicity was a term coined by Carl Jung. But when and where did Jung first speak the word in public?

That would be at a memorial address for Richard Wilhelm in 1930. Wihelm was the German translator of the I-Ching. The word was used to explain how the I-Ching achieves its magic. Later Jung worked with the physicist Wolfgang Pauli to develop the idea into a full-blown theory.

Instead of synchronicity, Jung could’ve used called meaningful coincidence “pronoia”, which, as we know, means the positive form of paranoia, meaning that the world isn’t out to get you, it is out to guide you. If that had happened this blog would be called www.pronoia.com/pronoiasecrets. (BTW, it’s available.)

4) What happens when synchronicity meets pronoia?

When Trish and I first met, it was like synchronicity. But not quite. I interviewed Trish, a teacher of English as a second language for a story on Cuban immigration. She went home that day and told her roommate she just met the man she would marry.  I had a deadline to meet, but  had agreed to come back and be a guest speaker at her class. What started out as an interview, ultimately turned into a life-long commitment and two new careers. It was a happy and unexpected outcome – serendipity, which might be viewed as a combination of synchronicity and pronoia.