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You are here: Home / Uncategorized / The Best Thing I’ve Seen about Katrina

The Best Thing I’ve Seen about Katrina

September 10, 2005 by Jan Bear Leave a Comment

Wilfred McClay talks about the blame game and the need for people to delude themselves that they’re in control.

He also points out the connection between the screeching and finger-pointing to the paranoid style of politics (and by my extension, literature):

It has often been argued that an individual’s attraction to conspiracy theories, far from being a sign of irrationality, is a sign of hyperrationality, of an insistence that great events in the world cannot ever proceed by chance or without human direction. The historian Gordon Wood wrote a brilliant essay a number of years ago, arguing that “the paranoid style” in politics was partly a product of the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment, with their insistence upon the rational intelligibility and orderliness of events, and upon the human ability to exercise control over them.

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