Word: paranoias
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Perhaps that begins to answer why this town oozes such paranoia about its closest Ivy cousin. The campus shrieks its school spirit--it doth protest too much in response to imagined insults...
...addition to analyzing the behavior of groups, such as governments, Abraham examined individual reactions to the arms race. He said many people set up "ego defenses" to ward off unacceptable feelings. These ego defenses can assume many forms ranging from denial to paranoia...
Carter's blatant politicking while in office has sown the seeds of paranoia, a tension of the type he claimed he would dispel. Who knows what U.S. foreign policy is exactly? Is the Georgia clan running the country? More conspiratorially, some have wondered if Carter deliberately induced the recession knowing the slump would tail off and conditions would be "improving" around election time. Perhaps that scheme seems ridiculous, but such is the psychological atmosphere--and it only represents relativistic politics taken to a logical extreme...
What does this all mean? Well, it means there are people here waiting for you, waiting with a passion--for what is not exactly clear. Now is the time to get paranoid, so that when you get here, you are so numb from paranoia that you can be yourself. Have some jokes prepared--popular ones this year are likely to be, "Hey, did you hear Julius Caesar's in our class?" or, "Hey, I just saw a piece of graffiti saying `Napoleon Bonaparte '84.'" Don't bother memorizing your SAT score; just tell anyone rude enough to ask that...
...atmosphere is hardly comparable to the paranoia in the Nixon White House, where the telephones of some officials suspected of leaking were secretly tapped. Says a State Department official: "Carter believes fiercely in the chain of command: once policy is set it has to be followed down the line." Still, Carter's preoccupation with leaks has worsened the already low morale in the State Department. Says a former official: "The message is, 'I don't trust you,' and it is damn hard to work for someone on those terms...