self/critic_isms

"Effectively, one is tempted to raise the question: what if Angleton was a mole justifying his activity by the search for a mole (for himself, in the real life version of Kevin Costner's No Way Out plot)? What if the true KGB Monster Plot was the very project to put in circulation the idea of a Monster Plot and thus immobilize the CIA and neutralize in advance the future KGB defectors? In both cases, the ultimate deception assumed the guise of truth itself: there was a Monster Plot (it was the very idea of the Monster Plot); there was a mole in the heart of CIA (Angleton himself). Therein resides the truth of the paranoiac stance: it is itself the destructive plot against which it is fighting. The nicety of this solution - and the ultimate condemnation of Angleton's paranoia - is that it doesn't matter if Angleton was just sincerely duped by the idea of a Monster Plot, or if he was the mole: in both cases, the result is exactly the same. The deception resided in our failure to include in the list of suspects the very idea of (globalized) suspicion - to put under suspicion the very idea of suspicion."