The Open Door

The Open Door

Perhaps the NHS should partner with MI5.

I appreciate that this sounds absurd and I am not entirely certain that it isn’t. Nevertheless, the idea has stayed with me because it touches on a question that psychiatry rarely seems willing to ask. When somebody believes that the security services are watching them, we generally assume that the problem is one of incorrect belief. The individual is reassured that MI5 is not interested in them, medication may be offered and, if persuasion fails, coercion may follow. The underlying assumption is that the difficulty lies in the person’s interpretation of reality.

Perhaps it does. But I wonder whether that is always the most interesting question.

There is something inherently problematic about reassuring somebody that a secretive institution is not monitoring them. The more secretive the institution, the less persuasive reassurance becomes. A denial proves little. A lack of evidence proves little. The secrecy itself can become incorporated into the theory. We see similar dynamics in conspiracy theories, politics, religion and even family life. Once trust has broken down, information alone rarely restores it. The problem is not simply informational. It is relational.

The more I have reflected on paranoia, the less convinced I have become that it is fundamentally about surveillance. Surveillance is merely the content of the belief. The emotional structure often appears much older. Someone is watching me. Someone is judging me. Someone knows something that I do not know. Someone has power over me. Someone could expose me. Someone could humiliate me.

Long before anybody fears MI5, they have usually encountered those dynamics elsewhere. A father. A teacher. A school. A church. A bully. An institution. The technology changes across generations, but the emotional architecture remains remarkably similar. This raises the possibility that some persecutory beliefs are not simply failed attempts to understand surveillance. They may be failed attempts to understand authority itself.

What particularly interests me is the role of humiliation. Psychology has increasingly recognised humiliation as one of the most powerful emotions in human life. It sits beneath shame, withdrawal, rage and, in some circumstances, violence. Many acts of violence are not attempts to acquire wealth or pleasure. They are attempts to escape an unbearable sense of degradation. The individual feels exposed, diminished and judged. The threat is not physical annihilation but social annihilation. Not death, but humiliation.

Seen in this light, the fear of being watched is often inseparable from the fear of what the watcher thinks.

The person who believes they are under surveillance may not be describing reality accurately. Yet they may be describing something psychologically real: a world experienced as judgemental, exposing and hostile. The content of the belief may be mistaken whilst the emotional experience underneath it remains entirely genuine.

This is why I find myself drawn to the thought experiment of what I would call The Open Door. Imagine that, instead of endlessly reassuring people that hidden institutions are not interested in them, we occasionally invited them to learn how those institutions actually function. Not because their beliefs are true. Not because the security services require information from them. But because reality is often less frightening than imagination.

The purpose would not be to prove anyone wrong. In fact, that would probably fail. The purpose would be to replace mythology with understanding.

Participants might visit intelligence facilities, meet analysts, lawyers, cyber-security specialists and civil servants, and observe the kinds of problems these organisations are actually attempting to solve. They might discover that the terrifying institution they have imagined is not a single omniscient intelligence apparatus focused upon their existence. It is a collection of people operating within legal frameworks, budgetary constraints, oversight mechanisms and competing priorities. Much of what appears from a distance as mysterious power often turns out, on closer inspection, to be paperwork, process, disagreement and ordinary human limitation.

This may sound disappointingly mundane. That is precisely why it might work.

Psychology already understands the value of exposure. People who fear flying visit airports. People who fear contamination gradually encounter dirt. People who fear social judgement enter social situations. Exposure works because direct experience frequently disrupts catastrophic imagination. The feared object loses some of its power when it becomes familiar. What I am describing is not entirely different. It is exposure, not to danger, but to reality.

Yet the longer I sit with this idea, the less interested I become in the tour itself. The truly important part would come afterwards.

The final stage of The Open Door would not involve intelligence officers at all. It would involve historians, constitutional lawyers and political philosophers. Participants would be introduced to the separation of powers, the rule of law and the constitutional architecture of liberal democracy. They would learn not simply how intelligence agencies function, but how power itself functions.

This matters because many persecutory beliefs assume the existence of a single coherent authority operating behind the scenes. The image is often that of a giant eye. One observer. One intelligence. One will. Everything connected. Everything coordinated. Everything directed towards a single purpose.

Jacques Lacan may have been describing something similar when he wrote about what he called the Big Other. The Big Other is not a person. It is the imagined authority that appears to know everything, see everything and judge everything. Sometimes it takes the form of God. Sometimes society. Sometimes the State. Sometimes a parent. What matters is not the specific form it takes but the psychological experience of an authority whose knowledge appears complete and whose judgement appears final.

Viewed through this lens, paranoia begins to look less like a misunderstanding of surveillance and more like an encounter with an exaggerated and terrifying version of the Big Other. The individual does not merely believe they are being watched. They experience themselves as existing beneath an authority whose gaze appears limitless.

Perhaps this is why paranoia is so difficult to challenge. It does not merely offer an explanation of events. It offers a theory of power. The individual no longer sees society as a complex organism of competing institutions, competing incentives and competing interpretations. They see a single eye. Everything becomes connected. Everything becomes intentional. Everything becomes personal.

Yet civilisation itself can be understood as a long attempt to prevent the emergence of such an eye.

The rule of law, the separation of powers, parliamentary scrutiny, judicial independence, a free press and democratic accountability are not merely political arrangements. They are mechanisms designed to ensure that nobody occupies the position of the Big Other. No institution should know everything. No institution should decide everything. No institution should become the final and unquestionable authority.

There is another aspect of intelligence work that I find psychologically interesting. The phrase “we can neither confirm nor deny” is often interpreted as evasive, bureaucratic or sinister. Yet perhaps it points towards something deeper.

Human beings are not naturally comfortable with ambiguity. We prefer certainty. The paranoid mind resolves uncertainty by constructing a coherent explanation. The authoritarian mind resolves uncertainty differently by claiming certainty on behalf of others. Yet both responses share a common feature. They eliminate ambiguity.

Mature institutions often have to do something more difficult. They must make decisions whilst acknowledging the limits of their knowledge. They must tolerate uncertainty without collapsing into paralysis. In this sense, “we can neither confirm nor deny” may represent something more than a security phrase. It may represent an institutional acknowledgement that reality frequently exceeds our capacity to know it completely.

Perhaps this is another reason why constitutional democracies fragment power. No single institution is expected to know everything because no single institution can know everything. Parliament sees part of reality. The courts see part of reality. The intelligence services see part of reality. Journalists see part of reality. Citizens see part of reality. None sees the whole.

What if power is not best understood as an eye at all?

What if it is better understood as an organism?

An eye observes. An organism balances.

An eye possesses a single perspective. An organism contains multiple perspectives.

An eye centralises. An organism distributes.

An eye pursues a single objective. An organism coordinates many objectives simultaneously.

In a healthy organism the heart does not perform the role of the liver. The immune system does not perform the role of the nervous system. Each organ has a specialised function and the health of the whole depends upon those functions remaining distinct whilst remaining connected.

Perhaps liberal democracies work in a similar way.

The courts are not Parliament. Parliament is not the executive. The executive is not the intelligence services. The intelligence services are not the press. The press is not the public. Their separation is not evidence of weakness. It is often evidence of health.

The paranoid imagination therefore tends to construct precisely the thing that constitutional democracy was designed to prevent.

Kings were eyes.

Liberal democracies became organisms.

The security services are therefore not the eyes of the state in the way many people imagine. They are one organ within a larger constitutional body. Their role is neither to dominate nor direct society but to contribute to its protection within a framework of law. Once this becomes visible, power begins to look less like an all-seeing observer and more like a living system composed of specialised parts held together by shared rules.

The deepest value of The Open Door may therefore have little to do with intelligence agencies at all. It lies in the possibility that understanding the architecture of power helps people understand the architecture of themselves.

The individual who enters the programme often imagines power as a single eye. Someone is watching. Someone is judging. Someone knows. Yet by the end of the course they encounter a different model. Power is not a single observer but a complex organism composed of specialised parts held together by shared rules.

Perhaps the same is true of the self.

The harsh internal critic is not the whole person. Fear is not the whole person. Shame is not the whole person. Anger is not the whole person. The psyche, like a healthy democracy, contains multiple voices that must coexist without any one of them becoming tyrannical.

In this sense the course would offer something more than education. It would offer dignity. Participants would not be treated as passive recipients of treatment but as citizens capable of understanding some of the most complex institutions in society. The self-respect gained from that process may be more important than any factual knowledge acquired along the way.

Humiliation thrives when individuals experience themselves as small beneath an all-powerful gaze. Self-respect emerges when they recognise themselves as participants in a larger system of meaning rather than objects within it. The person who leaves The Open Door may not simply possess a different understanding of MI5. They may possess a different understanding of themselves.

Perhaps maturity begins when we stop searching for the all-seeing observer and become comfortable with a more unsettling possibility: that reality is governed not by certainty but by partial perspectives, competing interpretations and irreducible ambiguity.

The child seeks certainty in the father. The paranoid individual seeks certainty in the watcher. The authoritarian seeks certainty in the State. The mature citizen learns to live without certainty altogether.

A locked door asks us to trust.

An open door invites us to learn.

And learning begins with the recognition that nobody, including ourselves, sees the whole picture. The Open Door

Perhaps the NHS should partner with MI5.

I appreciate that this sounds absurd and I am not entirely certain that it isn’t. Nevertheless, the idea has stayed with me because it touches on a question that psychiatry rarely seems willing to ask. When somebody believes that the security services are watching them, we generally assume that the problem is one of incorrect belief. The individual is reassured that MI5 is not interested in them, medication may be offered and, if persuasion fails, coercion may follow. The underlying assumption is that the difficulty lies in the person’s interpretation of reality.

Perhaps it does. But I wonder whether that is always the most interesting question.

There is something inherently problematic about reassuring somebody that a secretive institution is not monitoring them. The more secretive the institution, the less persuasive reassurance becomes. A denial proves little. A lack of evidence proves little. The secrecy itself can become incorporated into the theory. We see similar dynamics in conspiracy theories, politics, religion and even family life. Once trust has broken down, information alone rarely restores it. The problem is not simply informational. It is relational.

The more I have reflected on paranoia, the less convinced I have become that it is fundamentally about surveillance. Surveillance is merely the content of the belief. The emotional structure often appears much older. Someone is watching me. Someone is judging me. Someone knows something that I do not know. Someone has power over me. Someone could expose me. Someone could humiliate me.

Long before anybody fears MI5, they have usually encountered those dynamics elsewhere. A father. A teacher. A school. A church. A bully. An institution. The technology changes across generations, but the emotional architecture remains remarkably similar. This raises the possibility that some persecutory beliefs are not simply failed attempts to understand surveillance. They may be failed attempts to understand authority itself.

What particularly interests me is the role of humiliation. Psychology has increasingly recognised humiliation as one of the most powerful emotions in human life. It sits beneath shame, withdrawal, rage and, in some circumstances, violence. Many acts of violence are not attempts to acquire wealth or pleasure. They are attempts to escape an unbearable sense of degradation. The individual feels exposed, diminished and judged. The threat is not physical annihilation but social annihilation. Not death, but humiliation.

Seen in this light, the fear of being watched is often inseparable from the fear of what the watcher thinks.

The person who believes they are under surveillance may not be describing reality accurately. Yet they may be describing something psychologically real: a world experienced as judgemental, exposing and hostile. The content of the belief may be mistaken whilst the emotional experience underneath it remains entirely genuine.

This is why I find myself drawn to the thought experiment of what I would call The Open Door. Imagine that, instead of endlessly reassuring people that hidden institutions are not interested in them, we occasionally invited them to learn how those institutions actually function. Not because their beliefs are true. Not because the security services require information from them. But because reality is often less frightening than imagination.

The purpose would not be to prove anyone wrong. In fact, that would probably fail. The purpose would be to replace mythology with understanding.

Participants might visit intelligence facilities, meet analysts, lawyers, cyber-security specialists and civil servants, and observe the kinds of problems these organisations are actually attempting to solve. They might discover that the terrifying institution they have imagined is not a single omniscient intelligence apparatus focused upon their existence. It is a collection of people operating within legal frameworks, budgetary constraints, oversight mechanisms and competing priorities. Much of what appears from a distance as mysterious power often turns out, on closer inspection, to be paperwork, process, disagreement and ordinary human limitation.

This may sound disappointingly mundane. That is precisely why it might work.

Psychology already understands the value of exposure. People who fear flying visit airports. People who fear contamination gradually encounter dirt. People who fear social judgement enter social situations. Exposure works because direct experience frequently disrupts catastrophic imagination. The feared object loses some of its power when it becomes familiar. What I am describing is not entirely different. It is exposure, not to danger, but to reality.

Yet the longer I sit with this idea, the less interested I become in the tour itself. The truly important part would come afterwards.

The final stage of The Open Door would not involve intelligence officers at all. It would involve historians, constitutional lawyers and political philosophers. Participants would be introduced to the separation of powers, the rule of law and the constitutional architecture of liberal democracy. They would learn not simply how intelligence agencies function, but how power itself functions.

This matters because many persecutory beliefs assume the existence of a single coherent authority operating behind the scenes. The image is often that of a giant eye. One observer. One intelligence. One will. Everything connected. Everything coordinated. Everything directed towards a single purpose.

Jacques Lacan may have been describing something similar when he wrote about what he called the Big Other. The Big Other is not a person. It is the imagined authority that appears to know everything, see everything and judge everything. Sometimes it takes the form of God. Sometimes society. Sometimes the State. Sometimes a parent. What matters is not the specific form it takes but the psychological experience of an authority whose knowledge appears complete and whose judgement appears final.

Viewed through this lens, paranoia begins to look less like a misunderstanding of surveillance and more like an encounter with an exaggerated and terrifying version of the Big Other. The individual does not merely believe they are being watched. They experience themselves as existing beneath an authority whose gaze appears limitless.

Perhaps this is why paranoia is so difficult to challenge. It does not merely offer an explanation of events. It offers a theory of power. The individual no longer sees society as a complex organism of competing institutions, competing incentives and competing interpretations. They see a single eye. Everything becomes connected. Everything becomes intentional. Everything becomes personal.

Yet civilisation itself can be understood as a long attempt to prevent the emergence of such an eye.

The rule of law, the separation of powers, parliamentary scrutiny, judicial independence, a free press and democratic accountability are not merely political arrangements. They are mechanisms designed to ensure that nobody occupies the position of the Big Other. No institution should know everything. No institution should decide everything. No institution should become the final and unquestionable authority.

There is another aspect of intelligence work that I find psychologically interesting. The phrase “we can neither confirm nor deny” is often interpreted as evasive, bureaucratic or sinister. Yet perhaps it points towards something deeper.

Human beings are not naturally comfortable with ambiguity. We prefer certainty. The paranoid mind resolves uncertainty by constructing a coherent explanation. The authoritarian mind resolves uncertainty differently by claiming certainty on behalf of others. Yet both responses share a common feature. They eliminate ambiguity.

Mature institutions often have to do something more difficult. They must make decisions whilst acknowledging the limits of their knowledge. They must tolerate uncertainty without collapsing into paralysis. In this sense, “we can neither confirm nor deny” may represent something more than a security phrase. It may represent an institutional acknowledgement that reality frequently exceeds our capacity to know it completely.

Perhaps this is another reason why constitutional democracies fragment power. No single institution is expected to know everything because no single institution can know everything. Parliament sees part of reality. The courts see part of reality. The intelligence services see part of reality. Journalists see part of reality. Citizens see part of reality. None sees the whole.

What if power is not best understood as an eye at all?

What if it is better understood as an organism?

An eye observes. An organism balances.

An eye possesses a single perspective. An organism contains multiple perspectives.

An eye centralises. An organism distributes.

An eye pursues a single objective. An organism coordinates many objectives simultaneously.

In a healthy organism the heart does not perform the role of the liver. The immune system does not perform the role of the nervous system. Each organ has a specialised function and the health of the whole depends upon those functions remaining distinct whilst remaining connected.

Perhaps liberal democracies work in a similar way.

The courts are not Parliament. Parliament is not the executive. The executive is not the intelligence services. The intelligence services are not the press. The press is not the public. Their separation is not evidence of weakness. It is often evidence of health.

The paranoid imagination therefore tends to construct precisely the thing that constitutional democracy was designed to prevent.

Kings were eyes.

Liberal democracies became organisms.

The security services are therefore not the eyes of the state in the way many people imagine. They are one organ within a larger constitutional body. Their role is neither to dominate nor direct society but to contribute to its protection within a framework of law. Once this becomes visible, power begins to look less like an all-seeing observer and more like a living system composed of specialised parts held together by shared rules.

The deepest value of The Open Door may therefore have little to do with intelligence agencies at all. It lies in the possibility that understanding the architecture of power helps people understand the architecture of themselves.

The individual who enters the programme often imagines power as a single eye. Someone is watching. Someone is judging. Someone knows. Yet by the end of the course they encounter a different model. Power is not a single observer but a complex organism composed of specialised parts held together by shared rules.

Perhaps the same is true of the self.

The harsh internal critic is not the whole person. Fear is not the whole person. Shame is not the whole person. Anger is not the whole person. The psyche, like a healthy democracy, contains multiple voices that must coexist without any one of them becoming tyrannical.

In this sense the course would offer something more than education. It would offer dignity. Participants would not be treated as passive recipients of treatment but as citizens capable of understanding some of the most complex institutions in society. The self-respect gained from that process may be more important than any factual knowledge acquired along the way.

Humiliation thrives when individuals experience themselves as small beneath an all-powerful gaze. Self-respect emerges when they recognise themselves as participants in a larger system of meaning rather than objects within it. The person who leaves The Open Door may not simply possess a different understanding of MI5. They may possess a different understanding of themselves.

Perhaps maturity begins when we stop searching for the all-seeing observer and become comfortable with a more unsettling possibility: that reality is governed not by certainty but by partial perspectives, competing interpretations and irreducible ambiguity.

The child seeks certainty in the father. The paranoid individual seeks certainty in the watcher. The authoritarian seeks certainty in the State. The mature citizen learns to live without certainty altogether.

A locked door asks us to trust.

An open door invites us to learn.

And learning begins with the recognition that nobody, including ourselves, sees the whole picture.