Word: paranoidly
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...people here are very uptight and somewhat paranoid," says Jennifer Hill, a 23-year-old nanny from Salt Lake City who works in Gulf Mills, Pennsylvania. "They're afraid to extend a helping hand to people...they're afraid they'll get robbed or shot...
Unfortunately, as Bullock writes, "the process by which these convictions took possession of their minds remains a mystery." He generally avoids psychohistory, but observes matter-of-factly that both Hitler and Stalin were paranoid and insensitive to humanity -- that is, unable to accept that other people were as real as they. Both were, in fact, incapable of normal relationships. One word Bullock does not use is "monster," because he sees horror in the fact that they were human...
...government evacuated and closed down in 1982 because it was contaminated with dioxin, considered by many to be one of the most fearsome of chemicals. The mayor saw dioxin's toxic effects all too clearly: the elderly forced out of their homes and into retirement centers, people so paranoid that every common illness was assumed to be dioxin poisoning, neighbors quarreling and even threatening to kill one another. "This chemical uprooted 801 families," she says. "The frustration, the divorces, the stress, the deaths can all be blamed on this chemical...
...condemnation of "anthropocentrism" resembles the condemnation of "ethnocentrism" in that both begin by criticizing real forms of arrogance and short-sightedness, but quickly degenerate into a paranoid from of self-criticism based on the notion that valuing one thing over another--be it a culture, an ideology, or species--is nothing but blind prejudice. Every living being by nature belongs to a particular region, species and lifestyle, yet in our case we treat this particularity as something to be ashamed of and vigorously denied in the hope that it will go away...
...preposterous' in May becomes only 'difficult to believe' in January." The book implausibly assumes that the U.S. could be "forced out" of markets and that the Japanese people would support a rebirth of militarism. But its hyperbole is a perfectly consistent American version of the sort of unpleasant, vaguely paranoid fantasies that a number of Japanese writers have been retailing for some time...