austin_tycho | Jun. 12th, 2002

I love Rob Brezny. I would want to have ten thousand of his babies, if I wanted to have any babies at all. He runs this site. I get his weekly newsletter where he often talks about PRONOIA. After not consciously thinking about pronoia for several weeks I found myself dreaming that I was trying to explain pronoia to a couple of cynical, skeptical women in a coffee shop this morning, then I wake up and get my weekly newsletter:

June 12, 2002

DEAR SLY OPTIMISTS, BENEVOLENT PRANKSTERS, AND
DISCRIMINATING PRACTITIONERS OF BEAUTY, TRUTH,
GOODNESS, AND LOVE,

I must confess that early in my career, I was proud of my well-
crafted cynicism. Like most novelists, poets, journalists,
filmmakers, lyricists, talk show hosts, and critics, I subscribed
to the dogma that evil is interesting and good is boring.

You can imagine my dismay, then, when my muses began to nudge
me in the direction of sly optimism. "It will ruin my image!" I
complained to them from the depth of my worried meditations. "I
refuse to write shiny happy propaganda! I will not turn into a
dopey Pollyanna bereft of all critical thinking skills!"

But the muses were immune to my protests. Slowly and
inexorably, they reconfigured my coyote angel rebel clown
persona to serve a new master: PRONOIA. The opposite of
paranoia, pronoia is defined as the sneaking suspicion that the
whole world is conspiring to shower you with blessings.
(Terence McKenna had a slightly different angle on it: "I believe
reality is a marvelous joke staged for my edification and
amusement, and everybody is working very hard to make me
happy.")

To their credit, my muses managed to pull off this alchemical
abracadabra without annihilating my native skepticism. If
anything, it has become more robust, anchored as it is now in
the thrilling quest for fascinating good news.

Dear readers, I invite you to invite your own muses to nudge
you, too, in the direction of pronoia. In fact, I welcome you to
join me in a supremely subversive quest: Let's infect everyone
we know with an attraction to beauty, truth, goodness, and love.

I won't lie to you about our mission. Ignorance and inertia
surround us. Cynicism is treated as a supreme sign of
intelligence. Evil is regarded as inherently more interesting
than good. Beautiful truths are dismissed and demeaned, while
ugly truths are eagerly believed.

No, I won't lie to you about the work ahead of us. We will have to
be cheerful rebels fighting against all odds. We will have to
joyfully and exuberantly resist the temptation to swallow
thousands of delusions that have been carefully crafted and
attractively packaged by Very Self-Important People who act as
if they know what they're doing.

We will have to buck every system and go against every grain --
even as we stay true to our vow to have a lot of fun. We will have
to be relentlessly skeptical and sweetly innocent as we
overthrow the sour, puckered hallucination that is mistakenly
referred to as reality.

But we will succeed; I guarantee it.

With rowdy blessings,

Rob

SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): Believing in things you can't see
may sometimes be hazardous to your intelligence, but then so is
a fanatical faith in the infallible authority of the scientific
method. This theme will be especially apropos for you in the
coming week, Scorpio, when superstitious spouters of mumbo-
jumbo will be fighting it out with know-it-alls who try to cloak
their irrationality and emotional biases in reasonable language.
So what is a truth-loving Scorpio to do? I say take the middle
path between the frothy believers and the dogmatic skeptics. Be
both a practical mystic and a lover of supple objectivity.

Hmm! I will think upon the meaning of this sign. I am going for a swim.