Manichaean paranoia

Manichaean paranoia is a concept used by some political thinkers to describe the political-religious worldview of some political actors who view the world in stark terms of black or white, enemy or friend. It combines correlations with the dualistic cosmology of the ancient Persian Gnostic religion Manichaeism, which viewed the world as place of ongoing historical struggle between forces of an immaterial good realm of light and a material evil realm of darkness, with paranoia concerning actors supposedly aligned with evil who are actively seeking to harm actors aligned with good. Because of the intense dualism, intense moral polarization typically results. Every position can take on either a morally good or morally evil cast, leaving very little if any ground for ambiguity.

Actors who function within Manichaean paranoia believe they must either proactively fight against evil actors or be destroyed by them, and since nothing is more key in Manichaeanism than defeating evil, actors who function under Manichaean paranoia can justify actions considered evil within Western worldviews so long as they believe good will result.

Probably no political actors who display Manichaean paranoia do so out of conscious adherence to Manichaeanism, although similar worldviews have rough correlates, such as Christian and Islamic doctrines indicating that all actions in the world are ultimately manifestations between God and Satan. The concept principally serves a rhetorical function, used to describe a set of behaviors and the worlview perceived as driving them.

Although earlier political thinkers described Manichaean paranoia, it was probably the modern American political thinker Zbigniew Brzezinski who first coined the terms together in the early 1990s. His goal was to describe the worldview undergirding U.S. President George W. Bush's construction of nations as either "with us or against us" in the "War on terror". The concept has since pased into frequent parlance.