This summer of 2021, I had the opportunity to visit France, a country I hadn't visited for several years. It was an opportunity for me to observe a serious deterioration in human relations and values, undoubtedly fertile ground for the ongoing paranoiac decompensation.

It is this very pretension to govern this bare life that has clearly emerged since the first quarter of 2020: restrictions on movement to the point of immobilization (lockdowns, isolation), the distance imposed between bodies ("social distancing"), the reduction of faces to the scopic impulse (the sole gaze), constrained breathing, etc.

power that loses its authority descends into violence. And this violence "from above" is mirrored by violence "from below", which will in turn be used by the "top" to legitimize its oppression. This is the phase some countries will enter, while others are already there. What is the possible way out of this vicious circle?

"We have pushed logic so far in the liberation of human beings from the shackles of industrial exploitation that we have sent about ten million people to forced labor in the Arctic regions and the eastern forests, in conditions analogous to those of the galley slaves of antiquity. We have pushed logic so far that to settle a difference of opinion, we know only one argument: death."

To see a way out of totalitarianism, we need to understand how minds have been imprisoned in paranoiac madness. This implies making the phenomenon of delusional contagion[1] intelligible, and to bring to light the unconscious psychic interactions that combine to promote ideology.

The totalitarian regime aims at "total domination" (H. Arendt), that is to say, it interferes in the totality of social, private, and intimate spheres, even in the psyche of individuals.

Series in 3 episodes, published by L’Antipresse, n°286, 287 & 288 23 & 30 May 2021, 05 June 2021 - Translated by Thetranslationbridge.com Ariane Bilheran, normalienne (Ecole Normale Supérieure), philosopher, clinical psychologist, doctor in psychopathology, specialized in the study of manipulation, paranoia, perversion, harassment, and totalitarianism.

Since the beginning of this "pandemic", I had only written a brief article on "health totalitarianism", needing myself to see it clearly enough with hindsight to make a decision. Nevertheless, we can recognize, at a global level, with some nuances depending on the country, the mark of a delusional paranoiac contagion which shows its odious face more and more every day.

Paranoiac delusion has the particularity of being contagious... In this context, the psychological mechanisms at work are notably the collusion between the melancholic core of the paranoiac and the traces of unresolved pathological mourning in the "paranoee". One of the most essential mysteries to be solved in the field of the human psyche lies in the delusional contagion of paranoia. In fact, the only delusion capable of operating by contagion is paranoiac delusion...

Today, there is a trend, a divide, an ideology: that of "conspiracy theorists" and "anti-conspiracy theorists". Conspiracy theorists are "those who see conspiracies everywhere", and anti-conspiracy theorists are those who denounce conspiracy theorists. This is yet another way to shut down all debate and, above all, to prevent people from thinking about the obvious.

In these somewhat troubled times in France, I propose a philosophical reflection on the notion of Reason of State, before the next brief which will deal with "the psychiatrist and the politician" (can the psychiatrist, even if he wished to, abstract himself from the political field?).