I just rode the elevator with a confused man.
So we’re on the 3rd floor of Haley Center, in front of the elevators. I push the “up” call button and he pushes the “down.” An elevator arrives; it indicates it’s going up. We both get on. I push the button for the 6th floor; he says, “oh, is this going up? well, then I’ll ride up and then go back and get one that’s going down.”
As I exit at the 6th floor, he pushes a button – for the 3rd floor.
(And he wasn’t even a philosopher!)
Rate each of the following questions from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree):
- For the most part, government serves the interests of a few organized groups, such as business, and isn’t very concerned about the needs of people like myself.
- I have trouble doing what I want to do in the world today.
- It is difficult for people such as myself to have much influence in public affairs.
- We seem to live in a pretty irrational and disordered world.
- I don’t trust that my closest friends would not lie to me.
According to this Psychology Today article (CHT LRC), your answers determine your degree of susceptibility to paranoid delusions about nonexistent conspiracies. Scores of 5-11 indicate weak susceptibility, 12-18 moderate, and 19-25 strong.
Apart from (5), I doubt that most people could honesty give a low score to these questions unless they just haven’t been paying attention – though (2) seems hopelessly vague. (What do I want to do in the world today? Have lunch? Fly to Venus?) (4) strikes me as a bit odd, since I thought paranoia was supposed to involve seeing more order in the world than is actually there. (It would be a more cheerful thought if a comma were inserted after “pretty.”)
If I were prone to paranoid delusions, which according to this test I am, I might think its chief purpose was to plant in people’s minds the idea that anyone who thinks that “for the most part, government serves the interests of a few organized groups, such as business, and isn’t very concerned about the needs of people like myself” is delusional.