You say “paranoia” as if it’s a bad thing in spite of overwhelming evidence that we are one election away from complete fascism. Paranoia is not bad when evidence fully supports the fear of our democratic process being dismantled systematically and our lives being only useful in supporting markets, to be disregarded completely in any other context.

America, in the context of history, is an infant. (I know a guy with a door knocker older than our nation.) As such, it has little regard for the value of culture and social mores. We won’t survive much longer unless we can learn those, as markets don’t supply the unity necessary to function as an orderly society. We may go on as an economic force to force cultural dilution on the rest of the world, but we will not evolve if we can’t find some higher purpose than profit and efficient marketing.

We arrived in this precarious state by advancing the false concept of freedom as the absence of government based in law or its ability to provide any benefit to the people not arrived at via markets. The result is even more dependency on markets and a general abhorrence of government and law. Markets are a much crueler and less responsive master than the government. With a government, we always have the option of wielding the democratic process, or revolution as a last resort, to achieve security.