'That's just paranoia. Everybody in the galaxy has that.'
Douglas N. Adams
The question is, how to make that paranoia work
for us?
Beingkind, as has so often been noted (usually in tedious detail) by philosophers, pundits, and general professional cogitators everywhere, is constantly in search of meaning. The collective conscious and unconscious mind of sapients and sentients everywhere in the multiverse is continually thinking, thinking, thinking, gnawing at the knots of the Problem like a mouse at a string bag which its nose tells it contains a tasty bit of cheese. But, like the mouse, the conscious (or unconscious, or semiconscious) mind finds that every time it undoes a particularly tantalizing knot, the whole configuration regroups itself into an even more baffling nodal conglomeration. The mental mouse is, not to put too fine a point on it, screwed.
As the Goths know, the multiverse is a gigantic game of cat's-cradle. You need a partner, and you can't find one. As the Goths are so fond of saying, in Goth baseball, you have to be both the pitcher and the catcher.
So what does that have to do with paranoia? Or silliness, higher or lower, for that matter? Or the price of cheese?
Define the problem.
