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Basically the person affected with schizophrenia, specifically the variety of schizophrenic who claims to be a "targeted individual", claims to experience what is called a delusion of a vast conspiratorial network of control, surveillance, and harassment. The oppressive feeling is rendered in comprehensible terms by the attachment of some sort of fantasy authority/conspiracy symbol onto the delusion. E.g. FBI, CIA, police, nazis, commies, fascists, chinese, illuminati, aliens. Central to the schizophrenics understanding is that he specifically is the target of these operations, that he has earned the attention for some special quality, or more commonly, knowledge/perception of the operations of this network. He narcissisticly elevates himself to the status of fantasy hero/demigod, a being so capable and powerful and knowledgeable that his presence warrants not only such massive expenditure, but the sheer feat of coordinating that many individuals for the purpose of targeting one.
I could go deeper in psychoanalyzing them but thats basically it. There's a human penchant for detecting patterns and danger and threat assessment and maybe you could say theres some abberation with that part of the brain or some shit. But the point is that schizophrenics recognize something real. Their delusions are built on top of it.
What the schizo is experiencing is what we are all experiencing, namely, a stage in the development of a capital singularity where communication and digitality have begun to fine tune control mechanisms to the point where things seem to be really taking off. Globalism, ai, social media, memes, us politics, adjustment of ideological categories, video games, climate shifts, proxy wars, and basically capital creeping further and further out into everything.
For an example. Thousands of Americans buy hardware with Alexa on it, which masquerades as a primitive psuedo ai for the purpose of infiltrating living spaces and slotting into household operations to the point where heretofore unseen levels of biometric and auidovisual data can be harvested on a mass scale. Now most people who buy these things are aware on some level that the thing is collecting data, but this is blasely dismissed as "spying". Despite the shock and outrage Snowden was initially able to generate with his leaks, the reality of domestic surveillance by the US government is today dismissed jokingly and/or pessimistically as a cynical demonstration of fake opposition to power. So maybe your late boomer date will cleverly smile to himself and say of a targeted ad "ah'course the government/corporations are spying on everybody anyway". As if the us govt was half of it, as if this data collection were for purposes as innocuous as nationalism.
Generally ppl have ideological blinders on or literally cannot recognize what is happening. The schizo is sort of aware of something, however, like something huge and malevolent hovering around him at all times. He perceives the immensity of what is happening to humanity, but little else. For him the content is difficult to discern. But that alone is not what actually creates the delusions. The delusions (actual particular confederations of individuals being responsible and him having some special attribute that puts him at the center) could probably be attributed to either sheer incomprehensibility of the project being too great and thus necessitating his retreat into fantasy or some combination of narcissism and other complexes that I will not get into for my lack of psychoanalytic knowledge. Really the point of this piece is not to discern the particular mental structure of a schizo or how that develops, and I certainly don't mean to use narcissism as a pejorative. My point is that there is something real very like the shape of the schizo delusion that is so massive and all-consuming that it has the capacity to drive ppl mad.