Author — A.P. Egides. The book «How to understand people, or the Psychological drawing of personality»
Sacrifice and sacrifice
A paranoid person can endure many trials, tribulations, hardships, tortures, repressions, and even accept death torment for his idea.
The monk Giordano Bruno walked for 12 years to the fire in one of the central squares in Rome, where a monument was erected to him centuries later. And for what? In order not to say what I did not consider the truth.
Here Galileo, when he was pressed by the inquisitors, renounced the truth and only «on the sidelines» uttered the tragically famous phrase: «And yet it spins!» And Bruno declared his truth not on the sidelines, but in the face of obscurantists.
When a moth flies to the flame,
He does not think about his own death.
When the deer, exhausted from thirst,
Hurries to the stream, he does not know about the arrow.
When a unicorn wanders through the forest
He does not notice the loops of the lasso.
I am the forest, into the fire, I aspire to the stream,
Though I see arrows, flames and a noose.
I came across this poem in Giordano Bruno’s treatise On Heroic Enthusiasm. He attributes it to the poet Tansillo, but it is possible that this is a pseudonym for Bruno himself. One way or another, it expresses the idea of sacrifice, which is characteristic of paranoid people. Beautiful poetry, beautiful and tragic content.
But more than the idea of sacrifice, the idea of sacrifice is characteristic of the paranoid.
Even the sons were sacrificed by the paranoid (Abraham, Peter I, Stalin), not to mention strangers by blood. Sacrifice and sacrifice often go hand in hand. If I sacrifice myself, then I allegedly have the right to sacrifice others as well, to demand sacrifices from them. Sometimes even the right to die, to commit suicide must be sacrificed. The Christian religion forbids suicide, it is punishable by hell. And in the poem of the poet of the post-war and sixties era Boris Slutsky «Cologne Pit» there are lines:
And if someone can’t stand it anymore,
The party committee allows suicide for the weak.
That is, in principle, it does not allow, but as an exception, it can allow. Like this!
Alas, the paranoid themselves often for some reason do not want to be a victim. They send to death («But a man sent a man to the anchor with an authoritative look»), but they themselves do not want to die.
There is such an episode in the film about Lomonosov written by Osetinsky and directed by Proshin. The paranoid schismatic leader gathers everyone in a wooden church for self-immolation, and he himself gets out by a secret passage. Young Lomonosov reproaches him: “He burned children and women, but he didn’t burn himself …”
Such a moral «dialectic» is characteristic of some paranoid.