Fox News Channel's chief provocateur, Glenn Beck, told his television audience Thursday that he is "not suicidal, I'm not depressed," and that "if anything happens, I think you might know who did it."
It's just the latest example of extreme and paranoid rhetoric from Beck, who lives in a paranoid fantasy in which he is a martyr.
In recent weeks, Beck has implied that his life is in danger on multiple occasions, including on April 22, when he said to "check the usual suspects" if he "suddenly disappears," before airing a report about Goldman Sachs.
The liberal media watchdog Media Matters for America has documented other times Beck has said the Obama administration, and ACORN, is out to get him and may even kill him.
Beck's history of invoking violent rhetoric in opposition to the president and the Congress makes his paranoia particularly toxic.
On the day before the contentious healthcare vote in the House of Representatives, Beck "likened Democrats to Al Qaeda terrorists who were trying to bring America to its knees from the inside," according to Media Matters senior fellow Eric Boehlert.
Boehlert describes the rantings of Beck and his colleague Sean Hannity as "erratic, disturbing" and of course, paranoid.
I think it's something even more insidious than that -- Beck's paranoia is apocalyptic.
The Harvard psychologist and author Robert Jay Lifton described the apocalyptic mindset in his 2002 book Super Power Syndrome: America's Apocalyptic Confrontation With the World.
According to Lifton, this mindset arises from an anxiety about death, and that fear leads to a desire to overcome death through immortality. It contributes to intense megalomania, and paranoia, which can lead to violence.
Lifton explains that, as a group, those with an apocalyptic mindset seek to merge with God in His ownership of death, and believe they can partake in God-sponsored violence. Furthermore, a sense of paranoia accompanies the grandiosity of the apocalyptic leaders and their followers, according to Lifton:
"Inseparable from this grandiosity is the paranoid edge of the apocalyptic mindset. Leader and followers feel themselves constantly under attack -- threatened not just with harm but with annihilation. For them that would mean the obliteration of everything of value on this degraded planet, of the future itself. They must destroy the world in order to survive themselves." (Super Power Syndrome, page 24).
Media Matters
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