Word: paranoid
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...that the world premiere of Tristan und Isolde was largely responsible for Prussia's defeat of the Royal Bavarian Army in 1866; after the opera, there was no money left for the guns. The defeated Ludwig, bewitched by Wagner, staged three more premieres before he succumbed to a paranoid fear of crowds that kept him away from opening nights. "Each time I enter my box," he said, "I feel as if a thousand needles stab me when I see all those binoculars turned at me." The king's therapy was truly regal: from 1872 until his death...
...duration he might also outgrow his paranoid delusion that there exists a secret brotherhood among architects whose cosa nostra is the clever foisting of "cheap", "disfiguring", "sleazy", "hideous", "bad", "unsightly", "unbalanced", "ugly", "monstrous", and (finally) "unattractive" buildings upon the architecturally uneducated public among whom Mr. Weil is the example par excellence. K. Paul Zygas...
...final analysis, the argument for American and African unity rests on the undemonstrable--and perhaps slightly paranoid--act of pure faith which asserts a priori that whites and Negroes per se cannot understand one another nor collaborate in an atmosphere of equality and mutual respect. One thing is certain: the surest way to prevent equality is to convince everyone of such a thesis. Paranoid presuppositions rapidly become self-fulfilling prophecies. The ideal of equality is not refuted, it is merely rendered historically impossible by ideologies which generate racial distrust...
Smoldering Decay. Joanne Greenberg. a Colorado housewife and part-time medievalist, spent five years digging into the historical records on the York slaughter for her first novel. The result is a fascinating and minute examination of 12th century English life. The feudal structure was beginning to decay. Paranoid religious fanaticism sapped the strength of the monastic community, and the power of the baronies was gradually being clipped by the Crown. Lack of funds postponed the start of the Third Crusade, which was expected to revive both faith and the church's fortune. As setback piled on setback, the smoldering...
...mind, he says: "The mind is a tiny fragment of the brain-box complex. It is the game-playing fragment--a useful and entertaining tool but quite irrelevant to survival... We over-value the mind--that flimsy collection of learned words and verbal connections; the mind, that system of paranoid delusions with the learned self as center. And we eschew the non-mind, non-game intuitive insight-outlook which is the key to the religious experience, to the love experience." (T. Leary, "How to change behavior," in G.S. Nielsen (Ed.) Clinical psychology: proceedings of the 14th international congress of applied...